


Not Static and Humane

by ncfan



Series: Legendarium Ladies April [36]
Category: TOLKIEN J. R. R. - Works & Related Fandoms, The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: (Though these do not come up much), Cultural Differences, Death, Gen, POV Avari, POV Child, POV Female Character, Storytelling, The Avari on everything really, The Avari on the Valar, Trauma, Tumblr: legendariumladiesapril, legendarium ladies april
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-20
Updated: 2020-04-20
Packaged: 2021-03-01 19:27:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 66,081
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23762296
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ncfan/pseuds/ncfan
Summary: It was as her mother had told her: the world was made of stories, and thus it made perfect sense that she should make a story of herself. A mystery that only the most dedicated would ever be able to solve. That would be safest.
Series: Legendarium Ladies April [36]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/244393
Comments: 2
Kudos: 14
Collections: Legendarium Ladies April 2020





	1. Chapter One

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the April 18th, 2015 [poetry prompt](https://legendariumladiesapril.tumblr.com/post/116716787123/legendarium-ladies-april-prompts-for-april-18), _Anchorite_. Normally, I would put the full text of the poem in the end note, but since this unexpectedly became a multi-chapter, I will include it here, at the top.
> 
>  _Anchorite_ , by Nastasza Stark
> 
> the divine is full of monsters;
> 
> incandescent giants who lick their gold teeth,  
> whose mouths are full of crumbling cities, who breathe  
> death and fire and revelation and madness while  
> diamonds crack like splinters of bone between their gums
> 
> their whims are carved in stone, sand, pillars of salt  
> their feathers sticky with luminescent blood, their fingers  
> thunderous with creation, lightning in their eyes  
> that crackles and hisses from every direction of the sky
> 
> the divine is not static and humane; the divine does not play nice.
> 
> they will eat everything you are.  
> they will leave you reformed in a roar of light, peel away layers of you like birth  
> and with a saint’s conviction you will know that nothing feels more like luxury,  
> better to be blinded by brilliance than close your eyes to awe-
> 
> for your lips are always being kissed.  
> your mouth is champagne roses. you will eat lotuses. your lungs are perfumed and  
> your bones will blossom into stars. your blood is wine and you are clothed in light;  
> your skin threshed wheatlike until the gold of you shines.
> 
> \---
> 
> Also, I have tried my best to write the Primitive Quendian names and place-names you will find in this fic correctly. If they are not, they’re just not, and I suppose that will have to be explained away by the fact that it’s been thousands of years since Primitive Quendian was first in use, and that the language has since shifted and evolved at least somewhat.

Ever-changing, ever-mutating, ever-evolving, stories were the life’s blood that sustained and fueled the world. Though the ways of the Sindar were little known to Elerâmâ or any of her kin, they knew enough to know that the Sindar preached that the world had been built on foundations of song. Even as a child, that made sense to Elerâmâ. Songs had greater power than any other magic to exist in this world, and if songs could weave complex illusions, if songs could raise towers and bring them crashing down in equal measure, then Elerâmâ could easily believe that songs sung by beings of titanic power could have created the earth that held her up, the earth that cradled and nurtured her, the earth that whispered to her promises of things yet greater. And if this world was conceived by song, what song might it have been? Not some drinking song, or a walking song, or a counting song. It could only be a powerful ballad, something that told a story, though it might be sung, and in voices incomprehensible and unknowable.

The world was founded on a story. Woven into song, every feature of their world, every rock, stream, and tree, would not be there without stories. And everything of the world was as mutable as a story, as fit to change as the wording or the order of the story. It could change at any time.

Some children might not be as preoccupied with stories as was Elerâmâ. But then, Elerâmâ did not know too many children. Her parents had had no children after her, and the forest in which they lived was so dense that the nearest space able to support homesteads was many miles away.

So. Elerâmâ had little company. She saw no reason why she should not live in stories.

For that matter, neither did her parents.

“Let’s see,” Mother said brightly, as they stepped together out onto the covered porch ringing their house. “The rain has stopped, Anār is shining once more, your father is _nowhere_ to be found and is probably sitting soaking wet in a tree trunk somewhere, and our garden has survived. What spice would you like me to put in the soup tonight?”

Mother allowed her to pick one spice to put in supper every night, regardless of whether it tasted good with the rest of the food and spices. She ate the mis-spiced meals serenely while Elerâmâ and Father both grimaced and occasionally found themselves unable to get through the meal. Father had once whispered to Mother, in Elerâmâ’s hearing, why she let their child pick something for the meal that she _must_ know wouldn’t go well with the rest of the ingredients. Mother simply shrugged lightly and said, “We should let her learn by doing. The first cooks didn’t know what they were doing, did they? They simply had to guess and hope it would all taste good.”

Elerâmâ _had_ heard that, and she had, quite sensibly, she thought, complained to her mother. They _weren’t_ the first cooks, and Mother _knew_ what tasted good with what, so why wouldn’t she _tell_ her when she thought Elerâmâ was picking out something that wouldn’t pair well with the rest?

But Mother laughed and pressed her hand to the top of Elerâmâ’s dark head. She said much the same as what she had said to Father, only adding: “Oh, but however will you learn? Just think, Elerâmâ; taste gives such durable memories? If you eat something that does not taste good, you’ll remember it forever. And who knows? You may discover, completely by accident, some mixture that’s never been written down in any cookbook, and yet tastes good enough to serve to a king. Wouldn’t that be exciting?”

Maybe a little. But not as much as having soup that actually tasted good. So Elerâmâ stared across their little yard, glittering with thousands of sunlit water beads, as green as the world must have been when it was newly-made and the deathly frost of winter and the rapacious heat of fire had been but far-off nightmares, not something of the waking world.

(Actually, Elerâmâ rather doubted that this was the green of the newborn world. A world that had yet to learn of fire or frost or wilting or decay must have been so, _so_ much greener than this. Sometimes, Elerâmâ tried to imagine that green, but whenever she put her mind to it, she just came to the point where she found herself pulling away and nursing a headache. Elerâmâ’s present opinion was that the green of the newborn world was utterly beyond the capacity of this old world, and that whatever it was, it must be too bright and too verdant for even Kwendî eyes to fully absorb and comprehend.)

Elerâmâ really didn’t want supper to taste bad again, so she thought about it for several moments, before finally setting on: “Basil.”

“Basil, it is!” Mother responded cheerfully, and did _not_ go on to add whether or not she thought that a wise choice, though Elerâmâ had long since given up hope on receiving any such guidance.

The wet grass was blessedly cool under Elerâmâ’s bare feet as they made their way to the garden. The air was yet thick with the scent of rain, so strong that even as they approached the garden, the smell of water mixed with the difficult-to-describe scent of rainclouds dulled and made distant the myriad aromas of the flowers and herbs growing in the garden.

The gate swung outward with a labored screech, making Elerâmâ cringe; the sound grated against her skin like rubbing her hand against a wooden post bristling with splinters. She’d heard Father mutter from time to time about how he needed to oil the hinges, but he had never gotten around to it. Hopefully, there would come a day soon when a visit to the garden wasn’t presaged by a drawn-out scream that had more of a place in her nightmares and in Mother’s most harrowing stories of the Elder Days than in the waking world.

But the screech was only momentary, and once the hinges’ squealing voices were silenced, there was left old wooden posts thick with moss and lichen and water stains, and an interior space bursting at the seams with plants that grew so thickly on the ground that the paths were overgrown to the point of being nearly invisible.

The forest was thickly-foliated, but not so much as this. Elerâmâ didn’t have as much difficulty moving around in the forest. But then, the forest was not so thoroughly riotous with wonderful smells as this, so Elerâmâ, heart lightened to be among them, could not really hold it against them.

Mother made her way quickly through the narrow path lined with brilliant colors and threaded with wonderful smells, tsking at the way the mint was starting to invade other plants’ spaces again, until they reached the basil patch. When Elerâmâ had been standing at the gate, the smell of basil was drowned out by the cacophony of the rest, but once she was kneeling in front of the basil alongside her mother, its sweet, faintly pungent aroma clung to the roof of her mouth, the presage of its taste in her soup.

“Hmm.” Mother leaned forward and plucked up a weed that was growing up between the patch of basil plants. “Elerâmâ, before we pick basil for our supper, why don’t we pick the greedy weeds that are trying to steal all of their food?”

Elerâmâ couldn’t restrain a sigh. She did love being among the plants, but weeding out the undesirables was far from her favorite activity. It was just so… boring. And, if she mistook one of the plants they wanted to keep for a weed, it went from being boring to being something that could lead them with nothing to put in their food at all. “…Alright.”

“Oh, don’t pull such a long face.” Mother placed a kind hand on Elerâmâ’s shoulder, tapping her fingers against her daughter’s shoulder blade. “Why don’t I tell a story to pass the time?”

If someone was ever to tell Elerâmâ that ‘Why don’t I tell a story?’ was a magic spell, she would hardly have been surprised. It never failed to have a very specific effect on her: the forgetting of all worries, all cares, and all irritations.

“Tell me a new story!” Elerâmâ chirped excitedly. “Tell me a new story!”

“So long as you don’t forget to keep weeding,” Mother replied with a gentle smile, “I will tell you a new story.” As she got down to weeding, sinking her hands into the dark, damp earth so that she could yank the weeds up by their roots, she hummed in the back of her throat. “Hmm, let’s see. What shall I tell you? What yet remains secret? What have I _never_ told you before?”

Then, Mother’s lips curled up, thin and mirthful and secretive. “Tell me, my daughter, have you heard the tale of Tatiē and the Serpent? Have you been sneaking off and hearkening to other storytellers while I nap?”

“Of course I haven’t!” Elerâmâ protested, though without much heat. This was a little ritual of theirs, as familiar by now as Mother’s asking her what spice she wanted to add to their supper. “The village is miles away, and the forest is so thick that I would get lost before I ever found it!”

A bright laugh graced Elerâmâ’s ears, high and sweet. “It never hurts to be sure. My daughter is such a curious daughter; if her curiosity overwhelmed her, and she snuck off to listen to the village storytellers, however would I know for sure?”

A familiar pattern it was, and thankfully part of that familiarity gave Elerâmâ the knowledge that the teasing would soon be over. Now: story time. Mother must know every story in the world, for Elerâmâ had never known her to strain for any new story to tell her, yes, curious child. Mother must know every story in the world, and to have a share of her knowledge, Elerâmâ did not think a little teasing was so much of a price to pay.

“Tatiē and the Serpent,” Mother murmured, plucking a single stalk of grass up from the earth and twisting it around her long, clever fingers, “is a tale as old as any you will ever hear. My grandmother told it to me when I was very young. She learned it from her mother, who bore witness to these events. Perhaps my great-grandmother embellished some of the details, but I do not doubt that, in every way that matters, this is a true tale, a truthful account of one of our struggles by the shores of Cuiviénen.

“Now, as you know, when Kwendî die, our spirits return to the water, if they are not stolen away by the strange Balī was brought their strife out of the Uttermost West. This we know, for the water is the oldest thing to exist in this world, and if we listen very closely, we can yet hear it singing with the voices of our fallen kin. The water reflects us back to ourselves, and far below its surface dwell our kin.

“In the early days of Cuiviénen, many troubles beset the Kwendî. The Dark Hunter preyed upon any of the Kwendî who strayed too far from the camps, no matter the number of their party. Entire hunting parties fell victim to the terrible creatures that lurked in the darkness of the forests, never to be seen again, no hint of their bodies found, not even a drop of blood. Mothers and fathers told their little sons and daughters to be good and never stray beyond their village walls, or else the Dark Hunter would take them to his lair in the far north and turn them into his minions.”

Nowadays, most Kwendî had a good idea of where the Rakhās had come from. Elerâmâ had learned the secret when she had asked her mother to tell her the scariest story she knew. Sometimes, Elerâmâ wished she hadn’t made such a demand of her mother. Sometimes, she wished that a lot. Her father had assured her, over and over again, that such a fate would not befall Elerâmâ, that the means of creating a Rukh had been a secret known only by Thaurond, and that Thaurond had fallen in the South long ago, when Men and Kwendî went to his blasted lands and threw him down into the dark. That may be, but still. Still, Elerâmâ wished that that one tale, just that one tale, was one she had never asked to hear.

“And once the Dark Hunter was no longer allowed to hunt us with impunity, you would think our troubles were over, but no, no, unfortunately, they were _not_ over. The Balī had come to remonstrate with their errant kinsman, but they did not know how to do so gently, and their battles shook the earth, setting countless fires and destroying countless trees and animals. The earth shook indeed, so that the children of the Kwendî could not sleep even when their parents lied down beside them and promised them that no ill would befall them.

“In those days, the struggles of the Balī led to the deaths of many Kwendî. Kwendî spirits return to the water when the bonds between their spirits and their bodies are broken, and in those days, we did not understand that our spirits would _always_ go to the water, so long as they were not stolen away by either the Dark Hunter or the Doomsman. In those days, we thought that in order for our spirits to return to the water, they must be buried near or in water itself.

“At first, we prepared the bodies of our dead for water burials, and then set them in ponds or lakes, or Cuiviénen itself. The ponds we rejected when we found that the water had turned bitter and to drink it would sicken Kwendî for many hours until the bitterness left their bodies. After that, the wise preached that the bodies of our dead should only be consigned to Cuiviénen itself, for there the voices in the water were strongest—those voices out of time and space, spirits of those killed in wars of the Balī that are lost to history, demanded of us company to fill their time. We were made of the same stuff that made this world, they said, and our spirits would be perfectly at home in the water with them. It was they who told us that the water was made first of all, and the water that was the first home for anything on this world. The water, they told us, would always be an accommodating home to any Kwende who would accept it.”

Her hands dug down in the dirt near the path, Elerâmâ stared curiously up at her mother. “Why can’t we hear them now? I never hear voices like that in the creek.”

Elerâmâ did, on occasion, hear faint singing from the waters of the creek, though she thought she’d heard something stronger the last time her parents had taken her to the village, and she paused to listen to the roar of water flowing through the river. The voice she had heard faltered every time it struck against one of the rocky teeth protruding from the water, but it drifted still to her ears, a song whose melody she vividly recalled, though she’d never heard it before, and whose words she had never known and could not quite make out. But she’d never heard anything like the voices Mother was describing.

At that, Mother smiled wistfully. “Why, indeed? The world has changed so many times, so drastically, since those days of our awakening. Powers beyond our ken have played with our world, trying to shape it to their liking in defiance of the way it was first formed. But though there is much clay in the earth, the earth itself is not clay, pliant and formless and ready to be shaped however the sculptor wills. You cannot change the shape of the world without breaking it, and there are some things that cannot survive in the world when it inhabits any shape other than its original form. If we are to believe the wild tales of our cousins, the world already changed forms many times before the Kwendî ever awoke besides Cuiviénen. Who knows how much we lost before we were ever awake to experience it? And who knows where the spirits who counseled us on where to send our houseless spirits have gone, once our cradle was lost and the waters spilled through the fissures opened in the earth? But ah, I digress.

“Once the little ponds were found to be an unsuitable location, every time one of our own died and we had a body that we could lay to rest _anywhere_ , we took it to Cuiviénen. From the water, the world emerged, and the Kwendî were of the world. There was no place that was more of the world than Cuiviénen, so our empty bodies would rest in the watery depths of the lake, and our houseless spirits would reside there as well, never separate from the world in any form.

“But the spirits of our dead and the spirits of the slain out of time and space were not the only things to reside in Cuiviénen. Fishermen found it rich with fish. Those fish fed on the corpses of our dead, and there was something else in the water that fed on those fish, and it was _not_ pleased to find its home growing so crowded with the spirits of dead Kwendî.

“While the earth yet shook and the fires yet raged that the Balī had set in their war-like rage and their carelessness for anything they might destroy, a great serpent rose from the waters of Cuiviénen. Its body was twelve miles long, its green scales glittering in the light of the Kwendî’s torches like the polished emeralds the Tatyar brought with them from the Uttermost West. The serpent could not sleep, for the singing voices of the Kwendî who lived in the lake with it disturbed it in its cave and never gave it any peace to rest. The spirits of Kwendî are intangible, and were thus beyond the serpent’s power to interfere with. But the settlements of living Kwendî on the shores of Cuiviénen, they were well within the serpent’s power to influence.

“The serpent came to shore again and again, attacking every village it could find. It struck without warning, and it struck utterly indiscriminately, never distinguishing between any of the tribes of the Kwendî. Tatyar, Minyar, Nelyar, they were all the same to it. They were all its targets, equally, for all Kwendî must die when the giants of the world fight amongst themselves, with no regard for the ants they step on. If the spirits of rabbits could linger in the world as the spirits of Kwendî do, I have no doubt that this serpent would have gone to terrorize the rabbit warrens close to the lake.

“Now, what you must understand about the serpent is that it did not seek to kill anyone in any of the villages it attacked. If it had, I have no doubt it could have swallowed up every one of our ancestors who cowered on the shores, for its power was great, and the weapons of the Kwendî, even those of the crafty and clever Tatyar, let us be very honest, consisted of stones hurled from slings, with the occasional fish-spear thrown in. Any stones and stone-bladed fish-spear would have glanced off of the adamant scales of this serpent, and any flesh encountered by the terrible fangs of the serpent would have been cleft as easily as we put a knife through hot butter.

“No, the serpent did not intend to kill the Kwendî. If it did, no doubt you and I would not be having this conversation now. The serpent’s intent, instead, was to drive the Kwendî away from the place of their awakening for good. The serpent would go to the village and smash the wooden palisades with its great bulk. It would crush empty buildings, destroying stores of food and water as it went. Fishing boats were destroyed, and every time a new one was created, the serpent would smash it to bits before the fishermen could take it more than a few feet out onto the water. Anything the Kwendî used to make their lives in the embattled dark a little more pleasant, the serpent destroyed with extreme prejudice.

“Regardless of the serpent’s intentions, the Kwendî were terrified. More than that, they were at a loss as to what to _do_ about this monster. Remember, the weapons our ancestors had at our disposal were very primitive. They were barely sufficient to do the hunting the Kwendî needed to do to survive, and they had been highly ineffective when the Rakhās first appeared out of the darkness. Tell me, my daughter—“ Mother focused her bright gray eyes, still starlit in spite of the fact that Anār yet hung high in the sky, on Elerâmâ’s face “—if you were there, and you were left to contend with this great serpent, what would you have done to make it leave the Kwendî in peace?”

Elerâmâ pursed her lips. Thinking of the time last spring when they had had a problem with wild pigs trying to get into the garden—thinking of the boar tusk that had gouged her father’s leg—she said, “I would have killed something the serpent liked to eat and put poison in it, so the serpent would get sick and die—or would get sick and avoid the place where it got sick,” she added, recalling what her father had told her about the habits of some woodland animals.

“Hmm.” Mother tapped one dirt-streaked finger against her lips. “Yes, that would be good if you were dealing with a smaller animal, but with an animal as massive as this serpent, I don’t think you could find a large enough piece of bait to poison. And at any rate, that is not what Tatiē elected to do with the beast.

“Yes, Tatiē had decided that something had to be done about the serpent. This could not go on. The Kwendî would be easy prey to the minions of the Dark Hunter if the serpent kept on damaging their village walls, and the Kwendî refused to be moved from Cuiviénen where they had awoken, where they had laid the bodies of their dead to rest, and where the spirits of their dead had gone to live. Something must be done.

“Ignoring the pleas of her brother, Tata, Tatiē embarked from her village, armed with a sling and a fish-spear, to find the serpent. Regardless of what brave face she had put on for the sake of her village, she was honestly full of fear, but she feared far more the fate of her people, left to wander in the dark. Something must be done.

“Tatiē found the serpent lying on the shores some miles north of her village, its massive body wrapped into coils thicker around than Tatiē was tall. She swallowed hard, hefting her fish-spear, and just kept on walking until she found the serpent’s head.

“At length, Tatiē found the head, lying flush against the earth. The serpent’s eyes were closed, as if sleeping or dead—but Tatiē would not credit any idea that it was dead. She had never known any problem that was solved that easily. No, it was absolutely impossible that the serpent would have died on its own, and that the only problem the Kwendî would have left related to it would be the problem of what to do with its corpse. Tatiē had more work to do before the issue of the serpent was one to trouble them no longer.

“As Tatiē was trying to think of what she was even supposed to _do_ about the massive creature lying asleep before her, the serpent stirred. It opened its massive eyes, bright and luminous as twin yellow lamps, and Tatiē stood petrified in their light as those eyes focused upon her. Never had the serpent actually exerted itself to kill any of the Kwendî whose villages it attacked, but it occurred to her now that if the beast wished to kill _her_ , it could simply swallow her whole with no effort, and have done.

“But the serpent did not lunge forward to swallow her whole. It did not try to crush her to death in its squeezing coils. It did not try to fling her into the lake. Instead, it did the most unexpected thing of all.

“The serpent looked down at her, and asked ‘What do you want?’”

At that, Elerâmâ could not help but stare at her mother in skepticism. Far above, clouds were shadowing the face of Anār, a faint rumble of thunder far off in the distance potentially presaging more rain later in the day. “I’ve… never heard of a serpent that talks.”

“Is that so? Clearly, I have not been teaching you the right stories; talking animals _abound_ in the stories of the world. But yes, Elerâmâ, this serpent could speak. Many things were different in the earliest times of this world, and many things existed then that exist no longer.”

A horrible suspicion began to germinate in Elerâmâ’s mind. “It wasn’t a dragon, was it?”

“ _No_ , my daughter, it was not a dragon. It was simply a serpent.” Mother cleared her throat. “As I was saying, the serpent looked down upon Tatiē and asked her ‘What do you want?’

“Now, Tatiē was as astonished by this as you were, for the serpent had given no sign before that it could speak. It had done all of its mischief without so much as a single hiss escaping its mouth. It would have been easier for her to assume that the beast was mute than to assume that it could speak as a Kwende could.

“But the fact of the matter was that the serpent _could_ speak, and thinking quickly, Tatiē realized that this could aid her. Drawing up to her full height, Tatiē tapped the butt of her fish-spear against the ground and said to it, ‘I want you to stop attacking our villages.’

“The serpent narrowed its yellow eyes in a glare. ‘That, I cannot do. I wish you all to quit the shores of this lake, so that you cannot send any more of your dead to fill my home with their clamor. I wish you all to quit the shores of this lake, so that you cannot send their corpses down to foul the water and fill my home with their stink.’

“’But the waters of Cuiviénen are where the spirits of our dead belong,’ Tatiē argued. ‘This is where we awoke. To the waters, our spirits must return. They cannot return there unless their bodies reside there, also.’

“’Where the corpse lies has no bearing on where the spirit goes,’ retorted the serpent. ‘The spirit has independence enough that it can choose whichever resting place it chooses. You could take the corpses of your dead half a world away, and if they wished to spend an eternity in the lake, they would come to the lake. But to refrain from placing the corpses of your dead in my lake will only solve half of my problems. I do not wish for your spirits to fill my home with their racket. If your people no longer view the lake as their refuge, your spirits will not come here after death.

“The idea of Cuiviénen no longer being loved as the cradle of the Kwendî, their nursery and bower, filled Tatiē with an indescribable sense of loss. Many times in the history of the Kwendî have different tribes and villages lost their homes. Many times in the history of the Kwendî have our distant cousins fled the smoldering ruins of their strongholds after the armies of our myriad enemies have beset them. Losses such as that are as much a part of us as the earth, as much a part of us as our songs and our stories and our words. But in these days, the Kwendî were still so very young, and none of them had yet experienced the terrible upheaval of displacement. Tatiē did not yet understand that the Kwendî could survive the upheaval of displacement, did not yet understand that they could find and build a home elsewhere. To her, Cuiviénen was all there was, and all there ever would be.

“So Tatiē was desperate to find a solution that would not involve the Kwendî having to pick up their things and find a home in a place that was not by the shores of Cuiviénen. Their lives where they had awakened were perilous enough, between the Dark Hunter, the Rakhās, and the chaos caused by the wars of the Balī in the north. Tatiē could not imagine that there would be even the slightest amount of safety to be found anywhere else in the world.

“She begged the serpent to tell her if there was anything that could make it reconsider its attacks on the villages of the Kwendî. She knew that violence against those adamant scales would be to no avail, and that the serpent was already irked enough with the Kwendî that it would take little provocation for it to turn to killing, if it wished to do so. There must be some bargain she could strike, something she could mollify the beast with, something that would soothe its wrath and send it swimming back down into its lair, never to trouble the Kwendî again.

“At that, the serpent paused. It shut its eyes, drowning Tatiē in darkness anew as it thought to itself. After a little while, the serpent opened its eyes again, and said to her:

“’There is something you can bring me. Far to the south, there is a valley where Ivann planted many trees. Among them are trees two miles tall, laden down with fruit with gold and scarlet skin and pink flesh within. The fruit is sweet and juicy beyond anything you will have ever eaten, and it does not decay even after being plucked from the tree, but you must bring it back to me without eating any yourself. To eat such fruit without the consent of Ivann will send those who consume it to sleep for an indeterminate length of time. I do not know how long I will sleep, having eaten one of those fruit. I know that while I slumber under the power of the fruit, the voices of your dead will trouble me not at all.’

“Tatiē had no idea whether the serpent spoke to her truthfully, or if it was as deceitful as its forked tongue would suggest. However, she had no better option than to retrieve the fruit it asked for, and so, she asked it where in the south she could find Ivann’s valley. The serpent told her that she would know it by its golden glow, for Ivann had fed the soil with the waters of a tree of life, and everything touched by that would be golden and full of life and glow so brightly that it could be seen clearly even past one of the foul, reeking clouds of smoke that drifted down from the north. With this information in hand, Tatiē set off, seeking Ivann’s valley.

“Tatiē had never strayed more than perhaps five miles from the shores of Cuiviénen. She was a craftsman—a weaver, as it happened—and she had greater curiosity and zeal for making clothing and blankets for her fellow Kwendî than for wandering the world they had awoken in. As far as Tatiē was concerned, the only thing the wider world was good for was giving the Kwendî trouble. But if there was a way to save her people from having to go out into the wider world, into harm’s way, she had to know if it was true. If it was true, she had to do it.

“So Tatiē struck out for the south, with only the provisions she had brought with her to find and confront the serpent. Before she had been a weaver, she had been a forager, as had all of the Kwendî. She knew how to live off of the land, and did not doubt that, no matter what dangers might befall her, she would at least be able to find food to eat. Neither did Tatiē return to her village to tell them what she was doing. She feared that they would only attempt to dissuade her from her task, and that she, in her faintness of heart, might hearken to their persuasions and never set out on her errand. Never go to fetch what could, if the serpent’s tale was true, persuade it to leave the Kwendî alone.

“The lands soon became totally unfamiliar to Tatiē’s eyes. Mountains loomed up out of the darkness, blocking the stars which hung in the sky behind them. Tatiē had never _seen_ mountains before, let alone traversed them, but in those days when the Kwendî were yet in the first days of their youth, our ancestors enjoyed greater strength than we in these latter days possess. Though daunted by snowy crags and narrow passes, Tatiē made her way over the mountains, ever further south.

“It took a long time, longer than she had expected, to cross the mountains. Tatiē was stronger than us, but she was also so very inexperienced, and her lack of experience did not serve her well when she was trying to find a safe path south that would not see her going miles upon miles out of her way. Many times she set out upon what she assumed to be a safe path, only to find that the ground was treacherous or that the path gave way into a sheer drop down into a gorge, falling into which would surely have spelled Tatiē’s death. This was an age before bridges, either of stone or wood or rope. Tatiē could not seek safe passage across. She could only seek another path around.

“There are none now who know what other perils Tatiē might have encountered, alone in the mountains. The storytellers tell us that in the Elder Days, the mountains of this world were a haven for the Dark Hunter’s monsters. Not just Rakhās, but beasts of tooth and horn and ivory, beasts of fang and claw and poison, alongside ilk of the Spider and the blood-drinkers alike. But if Tatiē ever experienced encounters with any such monsters, and if she ever encountered monsters of which no tale tells us, we have no idea. Tatiē did not speak of it.”

The clouds were growing ever thicker, and Elerâmâ thought she could smell rain gathering anew in their depths. As she wondered whether or not there would be another storm, wondered whether water would get into the house again, she wondered also what a monster no one had ever spoken of might look like. An amorphous blob of darkness formed in her mind’s eye, full of malice and bloodlust and teeth. She tried to smooth it out into a shape more solid. Should she give it long legs or short? Should she give it claws or fangs, wings or terrible magic to overpower the minds of even the most strong-willed of the Kwendî?

It occurred to Elerâmâ that she was running towards a dragon. That was no good; she needed to come up with something truly _new_. But try as she might, she kept returning to monsters of which she already knew much. She could not make her mind conjure up anything truly unique.

 _I hope I never have to make up a brand new story right on the spot_ , Elerâmâ thought gloomily, ripping a weed viciously up by its roots. _I don’t think I’d be very good at it_.

“Hey.” Mother nudged her shoulder gently. “Are you still listening?”

Elerâmâ jolted, nodding distractedly. “I’m still listening!” she insisted.

“Hmm, I see. Well, as I was saying, Tatiē may have encountered any number of monsters during her time crossing the mountains, but if she did, she never told anyone else about it. There are things we do not care to relate to anyone, I suppose. It is a pity, though, that there may be monsters irretrievably lost to the catalogues of the storyteller. Imagine all the tales that could have been told on moonless nights, which may never now be told.

“There came a time when Tatiē had stopped to rest and sleep a while. She settled in a cave and set a small campfire, for the air in the mountains was thin and cold and she was cold and weary. As she lied down by the campfire, setting her cloak beneath her head for a pillow, Tatiē thought of all that she had left behind by the shores of Cuiviénen.

“Perhaps the serpent, hoping that Tatiē would bring it what it desired, had ceased its attacks on the villages for the time being. Perhaps, by now, they had rebuilt the walls and the houses, and perhaps their stories of food had begun to recover.

“Or perhaps the serpent had shown no such restraint. Perhaps the villages were all broken ruins by now. Perhaps the Kwendî, in their desperation, had acceded to the serpent’s wishes, taken their things, and gone. Perhaps, by the time Tatiē returned to the shores of Cuiviénen, she would find the land desolate and empty, home only to a heartless beast that would mock her with its lantern-like eyes.

“Either way, the others must have, by now, realized that Tatiē was missing. A visit to one of the outlying villages could only take so much time, and they would realize that she had left them behind altogether. Tatiē had left without warning because she was afraid that her kin would seek to, and succeed in, dissuading her from her charge, but now, she found herself regretting the decision to leave without saying goodbye. She would have liked to see their faces, just one last time. She could die here, and if she did, she would die without so much as one word of encouragement from her kin.

“These cheerful thoughts rooted firmly in her mind, Tatiē went to sleep.”

Something occurred to Elerâmâ, then. Head bowed over the dirt, she frowned at her mother’s bent knees, but said nothing.

“When Tatiē woke some time later, cold and stiff and just as weary as she had been when she had gone to sleep, the campfire had gone out. But there was still a light like fire illuminating the cave. It could not have been the light of the great fires that raged in the north; those had long since vanished, once Tatiē made it over the first mountain and the sky to the north was swallowed by jagged and unyielding earth. Neither could it be starlight. Starlight was brighter and stronger in those days, but it would not have produced such a widespread glow, and it would not have been simply golden, but also white, blue, and red. Curious and now wide awake, Tatiē ventured to the mouth of the case to see where the glow was coming from.

“Far below, perhaps three miles to the southwest, in a cleft deep in the mountains, was Ivann’s valley. In her weariness, Tatiē had not noticed the glow before she lied down to sleep, or perhaps a particularly dense cloud had been over the valley before, and had since lifted.

“Tatiē wasted no time gathering up her thing and making her hasty way down into the valley. Perhaps the valley had magical properties that had kept her from spotting it before. Perhaps the valley would vanish, or else move somewhere far away and out of her reach. Either way, she must not dawdle. She must reach the valley while it was still within her power to do so.

“Perhaps coincidentally, perhaps not, Tatiē found a narrow, winding path that led her right down into the valley. It was a reasonably safe path, if a steep one—steep enough, in fact, that Tatiē’s final descent down into the valley could more accurately be called a tumble.”

Elerâmâ tried to imagine the acclaimed foremother of the Tatyar tumbling head over heel down into Ivann’s valley like one of the comic characters in a puppet show, like the ones wandering entertainers might put on. Somehow, Elerâmâ could not quite make the image stick.

“What Tatiē found was a sight unlike any she had ever witnessed. This was long before the days of Anār and Ranā. Trees lived in those shadowed times, but they were smaller and poorer in those days, no match for the splendor of trees at their greatest. But this valley was the garden of one of the Balī, and she who our cousins, who in their questionable wisdom followed the Balī into the Uttermost West, call Queen of the Earth, at that.

“Now, you and I know better. The earth belongs to itself, and govern its affairs as it will. Anyone trying to call themselves ‘Queen of the Earth’ has an ego in dire need of deflating. What Ivann herself feels about the title our cousins have given her, I cannot say. If she is half so great or wise or good as our cousins claim, I can only assume she is not so arrogant as to claim the title for her own. The earth has no queen, but that our cousins in the Uttermost West would call Ivann such should give you an idea of her incredible power. She has great power over plants of all kinds, and can sow a barren field and make it rich with every crop imaginable, even those that would not normally grow in such a climate. Deserts become forests when Ivann sets her will to them, and wintry meadows will bloom with riotous flowers if her heart is set on such. This, we know. But Tatiē knew none of it, and thus, the sight that greeted her eyes was as profoundly alien as any she had ever witnessed.

“The valley was full to bursting with extraordinarily lush fruit trees whose boughs sagged low under the weight of the fruit that grew on them. The air was dizzyingly sweet with the myriad perfumes of these hundreds upon hundreds of fruit trees. And most astonishingly of all to a woman whose only experience of such bright light was bonfires and forest fires and the flashing terror of lightning strikes far too close to villages constructed entirely of wood, certain of the trees were, just as the serpent had described, glowing a bright gold.

“Tatiē followed that glow to a nearby tree, and found that it that it was heavily laden with large, round fruit with scarlet and golden skin. Elated, Tatiē reached up to pluck one of the fruits from its branch, but before she could do anything, a voice cried out:

“Hold, trespasser!’

“Tatiē was rightly startled by this, for she had not supposed that she would find any company in this place. All of the Kwendî were huddled by the shores of Cuiviénen far to the north, Tatiē assumed the Balī were too preoccupied destroying the lands to the furthest north in their battles with the Dark Hunter, and though it was the first thought to cross her mind, the voice could not possibly been that of a Rukh. With bitter experience, Tatiē knew the voice of a Rukh. She knew it to be harsh and hateful and guttural with a rough throat and broken teeth. This could not have been the voice of a Rukh, for this voice was strong and pleasing to the ears, and as powerful as any song of power she had ever heard a singer of the Nelyar weave to strengthen a village wall.

“Tatiē stared all around her, trying to find whoever it was who had called out to her. She could not at first discern the source, for all around her she saw only trees, and the golden glow that emanated from the fruit trees that had been specially watered from a tree of life. But then she saw a patch of golden light that flickered with special brilliance, and when Tatiē edged towards it, it puckered and shifted away from her.

“This was, indeed, a strange sight, perhaps the strangest of them all. But Tatiē had lived a life full of strange sights—how could it be any other way, since she was among the first of our people to lay eyes upon the world at all. She had lived a life full of strange sights, and more importantly than that, she had a job to do.

“Her purpose held fast in her heart, Tatiē approached the pulsing beam of light, and asked it, ‘Are you the one who spoke to me?’

“The light dimmed for a moment, as if it in indecision, before returning to its former brilliance. ‘Indeed, trespasser, I am the one who spoke. You are not permitted to pick the fruit of that tree. My master desires for no one to eat the fruit of that tree, for she loves it so, and does not wish to share it with any but her closest kin.’

“At this, Tatiē’s optimism flagged. She had known from the beginning that she did not, strictly speaking, have permission to pluck the fruit of the trees. However, she’d not anticipated that she would find any guards here to stop her from taking the fruit back to the serpent at Cuiviénen.

“Well, bargaining with the serpent had brought Tatiē this far. Bargaining with the serpent had been what had given her the hope that her people would not have to remove themselves from the only home they had ever known. Tatiē saw no harm in trying to bargain with this pillar of light.

“So, bargain she did. Tatiē smiled nervously at the pillar of light, remarking that Ivann was so lucky to have such a fruitful garden, and that even if she did not particularly like to share what grew in her garden, surely she would not miss just a few fruit from one of her trees. _Surely_ , she would not begrudge that much.

“The pillar of light responded to her that it was not that simple. Permission must be granted to eat one of the fruit from the tree Tatiē had tried to pick from. If anyone ate of the tree without having first been granted permission, they would fall into a deep sleep. The pillar of light told Tatiē that they were not certain how long the eater of purloined fruit would sleep; in every other case, Ivann had needed to wake the thief herself.

“’Can you grant permission?’

“’Indeed, trespasser, I can. But you have not given me any reason why I should.’

“And now, they had come to it. Though Tatiē was uncertain as to what a pillar of light would even want, there was every likelihood that it wanted _something_. The only beings Tatiē had ever encountered that wanted nothing were beings that also happened to be dead at the time. If the pillar of light was alive in any sense that Tatiē could understand, then she knew that it must want _something_. It was only a matter of finding out what it wanted. So, she asked it.

“The pillar of light dimmed once more, as if in contemplation. When it spoke again, it did so in a tone of hesitancy that Tatiē would not have expected from a being that had put so much power in its voice, with so little apparent effort. ‘I want…’ It had flared up again when speaking, but then, it dimmed, more drastically than it had at any other time thus far. ‘I have watched the creatures of this world live their lives as part of it. I see that at all times a physical form is vital for truly living in this plane of the world, and I, too, desire to live a life connected to this plane of the world. But for that, I would need a body. I have no body of my own, and unlike my kin, I lack the ability to form a body of my own, under my own power. That power was lost to me long ago, in battles waged in the unending Void of the heavens; without the ability to form a body, I am vulnerable to the malice of our foe, but I wished still to be of use, and thus Ivann set me to watch over this valley, far away from the perils in the north. If you were to give me a body that I could wear, I would grant you permission to take the fruit of that tree with you.’

“’May I use materials that I find in this valley to do so?’

“’Indeed, you may, so long as they do not come from any of the trees of which you are forbidden to eat.’

“Tatiē smiled, for in this, she had been set a task that would be easy for her. The pillar of light may not have known it, but it shone in the presence of the first weaver of that Tatyar, and Tatiē had, since discovering her craft, always been very clever and, more importantly, very _resourceful_ when it came to tracking down materials.

“In Ivann’s lush garden, Tatiē found all the materials she needed to weave the pillar of light a body which it could inhabit. When it was completed, it resembled in form a woman of the Tatyar, similar enough in face to Tatiē that had she had any sisters, the wearer of this body could have easily been mistaken for such. After all, the best bodies Tatiē had known belonged to the Kwendî, and she was partial to her own tribe, for all of her friendships outside of it. It would have been cruel, not to mention foolish, to squander the pillar of light’s good will by presenting it with a body that was deliberately misshapen or otherwise deficient.

“When presented with its new body, the pillar of light flared in what Tatiē could only assume was happiness. It flooded into the empty body, filling the fibers of skin and hair with a light that flared once, twice, three times, before body and spirit merged with one another, and the body was no longer an obvious creation of Kwende hands, but, though it did not look _completely_ natural, at least to a Kwende who had known little besides her own people, it looked like a real body that would have been the natural dwelling place of a spirit, even if that spirit was unlike Kwendî folk.

“’You may take the fruit with you,’ the pillar of light told her joyfully, its mouth not quite moving in time with its words—but it was making an earnest effort, nonetheless. ‘Having been granted permission, you will find that the fruit do not bruise or rot, and that to eat them will ease your heart and give your body strength. Furthermore, you may plant the seeds of one of the fruit, if that is what you wish, and have such a tree in your own lands. It will not possess quite the virtue of the trees in this valley, as such a tree will not have been watered by Ivann herself, but the fruit will be yet nourishing and heartening to you and yours. It will be your responsibility to grant or deny permission to those who wish to eat from that tree.’

“And having never given permission to the serpent, Tatiē’s bargain would be fulfilled, she thought to herself.

“But that was her business, and hers alone. She thanked the guardian of the valley, and took several of the fruits back home with her. Tatiē found that even one of the fruit was so heartening as to banish hunger and weariness from her body in their entirety, so that she needed neither food nor rest for a much longer period of time than even the most sustaining meal in her village would have allowed.

“The journey back to Cuiviénen, though no doubt long and circuitous thanks to the treacherous paths of the mountains, passed without incident. Tatiē went first to where she had found the serpent by the shores of the lake. First thing, first.

“Tatiē was tense as she handed one of the fruit off to the serpent. She prayed that the pillar of light’s permission had extended only to her, _truly_ extended only to her, and that the serpent, upon eating one of the fruit, would quickly find itself growing sleepy. She did not like to think of how the serpent would react if it ate the fruit, and felt only refreshed.

“The serpent swallowed the fruit whole. It was so tiny compared to the serpent’s great bulk, and Tatiē wondered if, even if the serpent was not held as having been given leave to eat the fruit, it would not need to eat far more than one of the fruits to feel the effects. But Tatiē watched the serpent’s eyes begin to droop, and quietly, she let out a breath.

“’You have fulfilled the terms of our bargain, child of the Kwendî. As agreed, I will go home, and sleep, and trouble you no more. Farewell.’

“With that, the serpent slithered back beneath the smooth depths of Cuiviénen, leaving only a shallow divot in the earth to mark the path of its miles-long body. It was over. Whatever rebuilding the Kwendî had or had not begun while Tatiē was gone could continue without any further trouble. Well, provided the Rakhās did not grow restive and decide that a raid on the villages was the perfect way to relieve tension. Or that the battles of the Balī and the Dark Hunter did not spread south to Cuiviénen. Or that monsters did not come prowling out of the dark to prey upon the Kwendî. Or that a random lightning strike did not ignite a fire that could consume an entire village.” Mother laughed ruefully. “Actually, the Kwendî were beset by so many troubles in those days that it was better to hope simply that a single one would not recur for a while.

“Tatiē returned to her village, to tell her kin what she had done. The Tatyar of the village were grateful to her, and they were amazed by the tale she had to tell. Though there were some who were wary of the virtue of anything that came from such a strange place as Ivann’s valley, still more were eager to see such a tree growing within the borders of their own lands.

“With the aid of some of the Minyar, seeds were planted in the main square of the village, and the fast-growing sapling that resulted was carefully tended to. As the pillar of light had advised, the tree which grew in the village was not the equal of the those which grew in Ivann’s valley, but it gave off a sweet scent that dulled the worries of any who happened to smell it, and the fruit heartened and for a long time sustained those who were given leave to eat of the tree.

“Alas, that such things now are lost,” Mother intoned, and Elerâmâ let out a long, slow breath as her mother went through the traditional closing words to such tales. “Alas, for our first home, alas for the waters by whose shores we awoke and first looked upon the stars. Alas for all lands that have been destroyed by the heedless wrath of those who claim to rule over this world.”

And with that, the story ended, and to Elerâmâ, the whole world seemed to dim, though that could have been another, especially dark, cloud passing over Anār’s fiery face.

But then, the world always seemed a little dimmer, just after the end of one of her mother’s stories.

Not that Elerâmâ couldn’t see some holes to pick at in this story…

“So…” That thin little smile crept over Mother’s lips anew. “What do you think?”

At last, Elerâmâ could frown suspiciously into her mother’s face. “If Tatiē went to the serpent alone, and then went to Ivann’s valley alone, how did your great-grandmother know so much about it?”

But if Elerâmâ expected her mother to falter sheepishly, she was, of course, underestimating her mother. Mother merely laughed lightly. “How, indeed?”

Herself not assuaged, Elerâmâ went on, “Is this _really_ a true story?”

“Oh, my daughter.” Mother bowed her head and kissed the crown of Elerâmâ’s. “All stories are true, one way or another. They reveal truths to the world, even if those truths are not so straightforward as to be immediately obvious to a child of your years. Now, come. Our weeding is done, and now, it is time to pick basil for our supper.”

Supper tasted good, that night.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Ivann** —Yavanna (glossed as Ñoldorin; being treated here as Primitive Quendian)  
>  **Thaurond** —Sauron (Primitive Quendian)
> 
>  **Anār** —a Primitive Quendian name for the Sun, derived from the root ‘anár-.’  
>  **Balī** —the Valar (singular: Bálā) (Primitive Quendian); derived from the root ‘BAL-‘, meaning ‘power’  
>  **Cuiviénen** —‘Water of Awakening’ (Quenya); the lake in Middle-Earth by which the Elves (then composed of the Minyar, Tatyar, and Nelyar) first awoke.  
>  **Kwende** —the Primitive Quendian name for an Elf, later adapted as the Quenya ‘Quendë’ (plural: Kwendî)  
>  **Kwendî** —the Primitive Quendian name for the Elves, later adapted as the Quenya ‘Quendi’ (singular: Kwende)  
>  **Minyar** —‘Firsts’, the first clan of the Elves of Cuiviénen, who were named for Imin and Iminyë, the former of whom was the first Elf to awaken. The Ñoldor called them ‘Vanyar’, ‘Fair ones’ (rendered in Primitive Quendian as ‘wanjā’, and rendered in Telerin as ‘Vaniai’), due to the nearly-universal trait of fair hair among the clan, but even in Aman, they still often referred to themselves as ‘Minyar.’ (Singular: Minya) (Adjectival form: Minyarin)  
>  **Nelyar** —‘Thirds’, the third clan of the Elves of Cuiviénen, who were named for Enel and Enelyë, the former of whom was the third Elf to awaken (Singular: Nelya) (Adjectival form: Nelyarin). The clan name they gave themselves was ‘Lindar’, meaning ‘Singers’ (rendered in Telerin as ‘Lindai’; rendered in Primitive Quendian as ‘lindā’ or ‘glindā, though the latter appears only in Sindarin), for it was said that they learned to sing before they learned to speak. During the Great March, they were dubbed the Teleri, ‘those at the end of the line, the hindmost’, for they were the last to leave Cuiviénen, and often lagged behind. This clan encompasses many different groups: the Falmari of Aman, the Sindar, and the Nandor (Which itself encompasses the Laiquendi and the Silvan-folk).  
>  **Rakhās** —Orcs (singular: Rukh); noted as the Khuzdul name for Orcs, but that it was possibly derived from an Avarin language  
>  **Ranā** —a Primitive Quendian name for the Moon, derived from the root ‘ran-‘ meaning ‘wander, stray.’  
>  **Rukh** —Orc (plural: Rakhās); noted as the Khuzdul name for an Orc, but that it was possibly derived from an Avarin language  
>  **Tatyar** —‘Seconds’, the second clan of the Elves of Cuiviénen, named for Tata and Tatië, the former of whom was the second Elf to awake (Singular: Tatya) (Adjectival form: Tatyarin). Their name in Aman, ‘Ñoldor’ (meaning ‘the Wise’), was given on account of this clan showing the earliest aptitude for intellectual and technical pursuits; it has a Primitive Quendian original in ‘ñgolodō’, from which is also derived the Sindarin ‘Golodh’, ‘Golodhrim.’


	2. Chapter Two

Mother did not come from this forest, not originally. Elerâmâ had learned this some five years ago, when they went down to the village and she heard the butcher murmuring to a goatherd in the market about how her mother had come from somewhere far to the south, somewhere far away from any forests. Mother was not from here. Mother hailed from somewhere far away—and indeed, Mother’s accent was not like Father’s, or anyone living in the village, and sometimes, when Mother spoke, her conversation partners would stumble over some of the words to come out of her mouth, as if they’d never heard them before. Mother was from somewhere that was far away from here.

It had always been a point of at least minor contention for Elerâmâ. She would ask her mother, over and over again, to tell her stories of her homeland, to tell her where her homeland was and what it was like and, most crucially, why it was that she had left her homeland behind her. Elerâmâ failed to see why she should _not_ be curious. Her parents’ stories resulted in her own birth, after all; it was only sensible to be curious as to the how and the why of her own origins. Especially when those origins were far more shrouded in mystery than what most could reasonably expect.

Mother indulged her in certain respects. Many of her stories were started out with “This tales was passed down to me by my mother, who learned it from her mother…” Elerâmâ learned enough origin stories to fill her mind for the rest of her days, were her mind a rigid box and not a sponge that could swell and hold more information than anyone would originally have thought. (The more of these stories Tatiē appeared in—and she appeared in quite a _lot_ —the more Elerâmâ doubted that _all_ of them could be true, but still, they were stories, and Elerâmâ could hardly complain about the wealth of new stories that had come down to her.) She was fed also comic stories, scary stories, ghost tales and war tales, and everything else that had ever crossed her mother’s mind.

Her mother spoke of recipes and streams, of trees and bushes and donkeys and cats. She told Elerâmâ all kinds of things, but she never told Elerâmâ just where she had come from, and never told Elerâmâ why she had left.

-0-0-0-

A year passed, and Mother began to do more than tell Elerâmâ her tales. Elerâmâ had always had a smattering of Sindarin from interactions with some of the traveling merchants who stopped at her village, but her parents had insisted Elerâmâ learn to speak and read and write in the language properly, as they felt she would need the skill in the future.

That wasn’t so bad. Elerâmâ had a facility for Sindarin. What was, initially a great surprise, considerably more troublesome was when her mother began to train her in the subtle and delicate and sometimes tedious art of storytelling.

“Now, my daughter, being able to remember each word of the story exactly as it was taught to you is not the most important thing. What is most important is that, if you find you cannot remember a passage exactly, you are able to substitute something in its place that is yet entertaining, and maintains the themes and the direction of the story.”

That had been the topic of conversation these past several weeks, whenever Elerâmâ and her mother were engaged in tasks within earshot of each other, and neither of them were engaged in tasks so strenuous as to prevent them from speaking to one another. That had been the primary topic of conversation, and it had proven an answer to a question Elerâmâ had never wanted, nor even thought, to ask:

Apparently, there could be some part of storytelling that was boring.

Oh, do not mistake her: Elerâmâ was still highly enamored of stories. She still loved to listen to them, and she thought she could find satisfaction in the act of telling them. She had not become a different person in the last year. Her heart remained fundamentally the same. But prying stories apart to their essential components was rather like the act of gutting a fish. She had gutted many a fish with her father, and had never known anything quite like it. It was tedious, and less than pleasant, and involved yanking out entrails, and it also involved chopping something that was once whole into small parts that, when viewed separately from the rest, could no longer be readily identified as part of that larger whole.

Pull the threads of a story apart, and once you picked up just one of the threads later, you’d never be able to discern just what story it had come from. Something Elerâmâ had been learning these past several weeks was that no element of a story was truly unique. Boil it down, and it would reveal itself as something that repeated in countless other stories.

There was the quest.

There was the fall from grace, redemption perhaps or perhaps not to be found.

There was the crisis of faith, and though the source of the crisis might differ, the mechanics of the crisis often followed a set track.

There was the love story, where a suitor must prove themselves worthy of their beloved’s affection.

There was the false accusation.

There was the disaster.

There was the displacement.

And there were many themes and motifs and symbols that could be associated with the archetypal stories, which the storyteller had to keep up with and had to bring to a satisfying conclusion every time they told a story, regardless of whether they could remember it in its entirety, or not. How it was that Mother didn’t break out in a nervous sweat every time she told Elerâmâ a story, Elerâmâ could not imagine. She knew that she, once a grown woman, would no doubt struggle to stay calm while trying to keep every important point of a story in mind while telling it to a crowd of expectant children.

Alright. Elerâmâ would admit that being able to switch out certain, non-essential elements of a story sounded interesting. And there was something else Mother had spoken of, something about turning a story on its head. But that was for storytellers who had a full command of their craft. This was for storytellers who could remember every last thing that could possibly be relevant to the stories they were telling, and for storytellers that knew the stories they were telling backwards and forwards.

All of that was looking more than a little overwhelming to Elerâmâ, right now. All of that was looking quite a lot like a mountain she was being asked to climb without any supplies, or even proper traveling clothes.

Mother would tell her that that was because she was still so young, and her training was yet in its infancy. Maybe, when Elerâmâ was feeling a little more secure, she would be able to bring herself to believe that. Maybe.

In the present, Elerâmâ looked away from the window—Father had promised to bring home fish for fish stew—and shot an unappreciative look her mother’s way. “So, I _still_ need to remember everything exactly as it is, and I need to remember ten different things on top of that?”

Mother snorted. “You make it sound as if it’s difficult.”

“That’s because it is!”

Elerâmâ was going to go on, but when she heard the particular tone in her voice, she clamped her mouth shut, refusing to open it again. She was young enough yet that she could break into a whine that bordered on a tantrum without realizing it at first—or, if she was overcome enough by emotions, it was possible that Elerâmâ wouldn’t realize it until she felt heat crawling into her cheeks. But she was now growing old enough to realize how childish her whining was, and to hate it. Elerâmâ was, you see, old enough to wish that she was older, still. A grown woman whose voice would never slip into a juvenile whine, and who could persuade other people to see things her way without having to resort to anything even half as immature as a tantrum.

So, it was only natural for her to keep her mouth shut, and refuse to open it again.

Meanwhile, Mother, who had been checking the clothes they had just taken off the clotheslines for any tears or burst seams that would need to be mended, watched her expectantly, clearly waiting for the moment when Elerâmâ would give up and open her mouth once more. Of _course_ she was; after all, Elerâmâ had always lost her resolve and started talking again before. Mother could recognize patterns, track them to both their source and their end points. It was hardly surprising that she expected a pattern to play out again, now.

But Elerâmâ thought she could exercise one of the other prerogatives of a child without feeling too mortified: she thought she could be stubborn for a while longer, and keep her mouth shut, maybe until Father came home with his fish. As she exercised the prerogative of a child and kept her mouth stubbornly clamped shut, she regarded her mother, considering.

It was not unreasonable to assume that, when Elerâmâ was grown, she would strongly resemble her mother. People were already remarking on the resemblance between them, and Elerâmâ could see, when she had the chance to look in a mirror, that the shape of her face beneath all of the baby fat was beginning to take on a shape not dissimilar to her mother’s. They already looked alike. As Elerâmâ grew to womanhood, they would look yet more alike, and perhaps by the time Elerâmâ was fully grown, strangers to this land would look at them and deem them sisters, rather than mother and daughter.

So, this was the form that could very nearly be hers. Mother was tall and svelte, with glossy black curls often bound back in a thick braid. Her starlit gray eyes sparkled out of a tawny face shaped a long, narrow oval, those eyes perched above a long, hooked nose, and full, red lips. Mother’s hands were large and long-fingered, as deft as any hands Elerâmâ had ever watched at their work. She had a scar on her left arm, white against brown flesh, that formed almost the shape of a star, a locus from which shot out wavy lines that rippled and curled about on her skin. Mother stood out in a crowd; it was always easy to pick her out.

Perhaps Elerâmâ would not have a scar like that when she was grown. But perhaps she would otherwise look like her mother, and she, too, would stand out in a crowd, no longer a scrawny child, but an adult of arresting appearance, whom all eyes pointed towards. She thought she would like that. She wanted to be someone who other people would find interesting to look at.

But for now, Elerâmâ wasn’t any of that. For now, Elerâmâ was a child who no longer wished to whine or throw tantrums, but who was still willing to be as stubborn as any child had ever been. Elerâmâ was a child who did not wish to open her mouth.

And her mother was a mother who wanted her child to open her mouth.

“Oh, dear, have you fallen mute?” Mother let her needle fall to the wicker table with a delicate little clink. She pressed the back of her hand against her cheek, fingers curled up against the palm, but the thin smile that might have presented itself on her mouth was not there. She did not sound angry—her voice was still light—but there was a neutrality to her that Elerâmâ was not used to. “Has my daughter lost her voice? Well, no fear; if you find yourself totally unable to speak, you can still learn how use puppets and put on puppet shows to tell stories with.”

That sounded even more tedious than what Mother had been teaching her so far—she wouldn’t even be able to _see_ the story that was playing out, not really—and all too soon, Elerâmâ felt her resolve leave her and her jaw unstick. “It’s just—“

“Hard?” In Mother’s voice, Elerâmâ could clearly discern the strains of sympathy blunting the edges of the word, but still, her tone was firm. “Of course it is, Elerâmâ; no craft in this world has ever been known for being _easy_ to learn. I assure you, you are not alone in your frustration. Hundreds, nay, thousands of storytellers-in-training have been in the position you are in now, and have found it just as frustrating. And some of them, I have no doubt, fell by the wayside, too daunted by the task at hand to go on. But many more of them—nearly all, most likely, managed to get through their training and become storytellers in their own right. And I doubt that all, or even most, of them, were ever storytellers to match the greatest storytellers of legend, but so very few storytellers ever _can_ be. What we can be is what we can be.” She set down her mending entirely and came to sit by Elerâmâ, touching a hand to her daughter’s hair. “Do not give up your training simply because you find it frustrating in the moment. It’s still early, yet. Give yourself time to grow accustomed to it, before you decide whether it is truly something you cannot do.”

Elerâmâ nodded silently. Truthfully, she was more than a little overwhelmed by the torrent of words that had flowed so suddenly from her mother’s lips. She had spoken with a passion Elerâmâ had rarely ever heard in her voice, and she had nearly been carried away with it, so far that she did not think she would have recognized the shores on which she washed up.

It had always been evident to Elerâmâ that her mother enjoyed telling stories. Never had Elerâmâ considered if there was something else behind the simple enjoyment, if there was something deep and powerful rooted in Mother’s mind and heart that spurred her on, even when her throat was sore and her mind was struggling to put words together.

She was considering it, now.

“Why do you tell stories?” Elerâmâ did not hesitate before asking the question; indeed, she blurted it out, the words fluttering from her lips almost before her mind could put the words together. Only after the words were out in the air, and it was too late to take them back, did Elerâmâ consider if maybe that was too personal of a question to be asked. But indeed, it was too late to take it back, and she did not regret having asked, not truly. She wanted to know the answer. No matter what it was.

(Elerâmâ never truly considered just ‘no matter what it was’ was capable of encompassing.)

Mother let out a soft, shaky breath, something that held the whisper of laughter, and the shadow of something shakier by far than laughter. “Why do I tell stories? Why, indeed. The answer is very simple, Elerâmâ, as simple as any question you have ever asked me. I tell stories for myself.”

To that, Elerâmâ could only tilt her head to one side. That… That did not make much sense to her. Storytellers told their tales to audiences. They did not tell their tales to themselves; Elerâmâ was not certain how they even could. It was a profession that was so very much for the audience, so very much for the recipient. A storyteller could acquire quite a bit of coin if they were very skilled, very fortunate, or both, but otherwise, Elerâmâ could not see how telling a story could benefit herself more than it did the people who listened to the story.

Mother had no trouble reading her confusion in that one tilt of the head. Mother never had any trouble reading Elerâmâ’s emotions from these small gestures. “I think—“ she paused, smiling to herself, though her head was bowed just enough that Elerâmâ could not quite make out the quality of the smile “—that you will understand it better when you are older, and you have told a few stories to audiences, yourself, but I will try to explain it to you.

“I tell stories for myself. I can only ever be in one place at once, but when I tell a story—“ her eyes grew just a little far away “—when I tell a story, I can be in many places at once. I can be somewhere far from here.”

“Like where you were born?” Elerâmâ couldn’t quite resist asking.

A shadow passed over her mother’s face then, so quickly that it would not have been noticeable, except that their house was flooded with afternoon sunlight, and any dimming effect was immediately noticeable, even to the eyes of a child who was not yet as sensitive to such things as an adult might have been. But after the shadow had passed, and Mother was herself, once more, she went on, as if Elerâmâ had not spoken: “I have told you that all stories are true, even if the truths to be found in them are not quite the truths we would expect if we were a judge and we called forth a witness to tell us what they saw of a theft. Not all truth is literal, Elerâmâ. Not all truth is straightforward.”

Mother smiled, that particular gentle smile that sometimes looked as if it was trying to crack into some other shape. “That truth is there for you to find, my daughter, if your ears and your mind are open, and your heart is willing to receive that truth and not turn it away at the door. It is always there for you, if only you are willing to listen for it, and you do not balk at what it says.”

“What truth is that?”

Laughter bubbled up in Mother’s mouth, like the echoing suggestion of voices in the nearby creek. “Oh, no. That would be too easy.”

-0-0-0-

In midwinter, in the depths of long nights and frigid winds and frost clinging to pine needles like leaves encased in clear, cold amber:

Once upon a time…

Elerâmâ knew, from that, that this would be a tale of Men. The only tales Mother ever told that started with ‘Once upon a time’ were tales of Men.* Mother did not tell tales of Men very often. That was due in part to the fact that few of the people in the village considered Men to have ever done something worth telling stories about, no doubt (thoroughly unfair, in Elerâmâ’s view; Mother’s tales of Tar-Telperiën and her adventures in Númenor were _definitely_ worth telling), but part of that was that Elerâmâ, older now and a little more realistic about her mother’s capabilities, did not know that her mother knew quite as many stories of Men as she did of the Kwendî. Anyways…

Once upon a time, Men found themselves waking as Kwendî had once awoken. The place of their awakening, Hildórien, was now as thoroughly lost as Cuiviénen, and the Kwendî and Men, regardless of whatever else might divide them, shared an ancient, primordial grief that transcended all other griefs. There was no grief quite like the grief of losing your first home for all time. Elerâmâ could only regard the loss of Cuiviénen in a secondhand sense, but sometimes, when she really reached down into herself…

No. She did not wish to touch that tender sore. Once inflamed, it would take entirely too much time to be quiet again.

The story, there was still the story.

Once upon a time, Men awoke in the long-lost land of Hildórien, so far in the east of the world that they must have been on the very threshold of the Gates of Morning. We Kwendî awoke to starlight, and thus we have ever revered it above all the light in the world. But Men awoke as Anār rose over the eastern horizon for the very first time, and thus, it is to Anār that they give their love, and Men have ever suffered when cut off from Anār’s light.

As it was with the Kwendî and Cuiviénen, Men awoke in Hildórien because it was the place that the ultimate maker of this world wished for them to awaken. They were there by the leave of that architect, and would be permitted to stay there only so long as they abided by the architect’s will.

But not for nothing had the Dark Hunter been given such a name, and soon, he found the place where Men had awoken, and sent spies to learn all that they could of Men, and to cause them woe in any way they could. You see, the Dark Hunter was always far warier of Men than of the Kwendî. Some say that this is because in Men, the Dark Hunter perceived a potential rival in tyranny and stolen dominion over the earth. Others say, however, that the reason is that while the Dark Hunter knew much regarding the capabilities and limitations of the Kwendî, knew our hearts and minds, Men were a mystery to him, a pool of water so choked with dust that it had been totally opaque. Like most tyrants, the Dark Hunter was a petty, paranoid type who ever feared threats to his power, seeing conspiracies where there were none, and were it not for his terrible power, it’s likely that he would have alienated all of his allies and made himself vulnerable before the Balī finally roused themselves to deal with him, once and for all.

Whatever the reason, the Dark Hunter was very interested in finding Men before anyone else could. Given what happened next, what seems most likely is that the Dark Hunter deemed the best way to neutralize the threat he felt Men to pose was to subvert their wills to his cause.

Thaurond, the greatest liar to ever walk the earth, was sent among Men to turn their hearts to the Dark Hunter and make them yet more fodder for his unending wars. At times, he sought to cozen Men with honeyed promises of wealth and glory in the Dark Hunter’s service. At other times, he appealed to fear instead, telling Men that the Kwendî would think them no better than beasts and use them as thralls in their fields, or else hunt them for sport and eat the flesh of their children. Such lies have survived in altered forms even to this day, for there are traditions among certain tribes of Men that Kwendî are child-stealers, who will rob cradles of healthy children of Men in exchange for the sickly and the strange infants of our own kind.

The Dark Hunter, Thaurond assured these newly-awakened Men, could protect them from the cruelties of the Kwendî. The might of these soulless monsters was nothing compared to the King of the Earth, as Thaurond represented the Dark Hunter to Men. But if they defied the will of their rightful king, Thaurond warned, his wrath would be profound and implacable. The King of the Earth had no mercy to spare for disobedient and ungrateful subjects, and he would smite them for their disloyalty, without fail.

Cowed by the threats of Thaurond, some among Men agreed to serve and worship the Dark Hunter as the King of the Earth. Perhaps some did it out of greed, instead, but fear has always been a far more compelling motivator than greed, and Thaurond appealed far more to fear than to greed.

There were some among Men who were neither cowed by fear, nor enticed by riches. They shut their ears and their hearts to Thaurond’s words, and refused to have any business with him. They would sooner be free and poor than the rich thralls of a tyrant. They would not serve.

But when the architect turned their attention back to Hildórien, they cared not that some of the Men had not hearkened to the entreaties of Thaurond. After sending Thaurond back to his master like a beaten dog, the architect banished all Men from Hildórien, for all time. ‘You have done a great offense against me,’ they pronounced, ‘and this, I do not forgive.’

In the dark of midwinter, under stars and among the frost, Mother looked to Elerâmâ, and asked for archetypes.

“The displacement, and the fall from grace,” Elerâmâ replied easily. She bit her lip a little while, before tentatively adding, “And the false accusation?”

To say it felt like risking banishment herself, from her own personal Cuiviénen. Elerâmâ was of her mother’s kind—she did not treat those who claimed dominion over this earth with the same slavish adoration that her distant cousins lavished upon them, and did not think she would ever regard the Balī with anything kinder than intense skepticism. But the faceless ultimate architect of this world had, in turn, created the first Kwendî, and perhaps they had sewn into the Kwendî’s minds the tendency to be more careful of offending them than of speaking truth. Elerâmâ _knew_ it was true, knew that not all of the Men had been guilty of the charge laid against them, and yet, something in her quailed against the idea of laying such an accusation at the feet of the architect.

She hated that she could be compelled to such by something so far removed from her, something that could not possibly have known her, or understood her life and the relationship she had with the world. She wished she could have pinpointed the part of her mind this caution came from, and scooped it out and burned it.

Mother nodded solemnly. “Yes, indeed, the false accusation plays a large part in the woes of Men after leaving Hildórien, for the architect closed their heart to Men, and left them to try to build lives in this world without so much as a single word or any sign of guidance. Our kin, both close and distant, deride Men for their inclination towards making chaos out of peace, but after what became of them in Hildórien, I can scarcely find it in me to be surprised by it. I do not see how the lives of Men could have ever been peaceful.”

Elerâmâ shuddered at the thought of it, herself. Imagine if the Dark Hunter had taken the same tack with Kwendî as he had with Men. She had no doubt that all of his promises would have rotted and disintegrated the moment the gates of the Dark Hunter’s stronghold slammed shut behind the Kwendî. The Dark Hunter had never made a genuine promise in all of his many, many, _many_ years. If the Kwendî had hearkened to his emissaries, Elerâmâ would not be here, now. Or perhaps she would be, but her body would be twisted and unrecognizable, and her mind would be full of hate.

For whatever reason, the Dark Hunter had taken a different tack with the Kwendî, harassing them and kidnapping them while they were still so vulnerable, freshly-awakened by the starlit waters of Cuiviénen, but he had only turned to attempts at subversion and outright mass-murder after the Kwendî had grown strong. Elerâmâ did not know why that was, and the idea of being grateful to _him_ for anything made her stomach feel as if it was full of boiling water, but Elerâmâ was grateful that she could exist in this moment, in the body and the mind that she possessed.

Elerâmâ looked out over their little yard. The glittering frost that coated the dead grass was as a firmament of tiny stars brought down to and held captive in this earth. Eyes still locked on those false promises of stars: “Why were the faithful cast out alongside the faithless?”

“Careful with that phrasing,” Mother admonished, in a voice as soft as a whisper. “Such roads of thought can lead you down dangerous paths. I do not think the difference between them had aught to do with faith. Like I told you, I think it had much more to do, so much more to do, with fear, and fear of the unknown can be so many things to so many different people, can lead them to so many different conclusions, and yes, there is a danger in fear that is all its own, unkillable and inviolate.

“And to answer your question, I do not know. I really do not know. Who can say why beings of such great and terrible scope that we must seem as little more than insects to them make any decision regarding us?” Mother mused to herself, with marked bitterness. “This is not their plane, not their natural plane. They should not meddle with it, but they have so much power that there is no one among us with the power to gainsay them.”

But in these days, the Balī had forsaken these lands completely, returning to the Uttermost West they called their home, and troubling the Men and Kwendî of these eastern lands no more. Another thing to be grateful for. Whenever the Balī involved themselves too closely with the affairs of this land, the result always seemed to be something along the lines of mass destruction and tens or hundreds of thousands of deaths, though the identity of the dead could vary greatly. So the stories Elerâmâ had been taught told her. So she believed. And Elerâmâ would like to be able to enjoy her world without having to fear that some being full of power and heedless wrath and carelessness would smash it the way Elerâmâ might break a delicate shell by treading on it while walking alone the river shore.

There was something else coming. There was always something else coming after Mother told her a story, something that Elerâmâ had come to regard almost with dread, for she never had the right answer to give, no matter what that answer might have been—was it multiple right answers, or was it the same answer over and over again that she was perhaps grasping at the edges of, perhaps not even getting that close, and never touching on directly. She didn’t know. That was the problem. She didn’t know.

Mother fixed her in a long, steady look. The darkness obliterated any delicate expression from her face, giving Elerâmâ nothing to look for, no subconscious hint that she might have been able to discern. “And what truth do you see there, what truth that seemed not to be rooted in the tale, but elsewhere?”

Elerâmâ could root around for the right answer all she liked, and that she did on this cold winter night, rattling off potential answer after potential answer. She wanted to hear the truth burn in her mouth, a firebrand of power and strength that no one would have been able to gainsay. She wanted the truth, and more than that, she wanted to hit on it herself, without her mother needing to take her by the hand and put her on the path. She felt as if the truth would have answered every question that had ever passed through her mind, and yet remained unsatisfied.

Tonight was to be no different from many other nights. Elerâmâ reached for answer after answer, until her mother shushed her. She did not seem disappointed, not really, but then, she never did, when Elerâmâ rooted around for an answer, and never gripped the right one. “Ah, well,” she sighed. “Another night, perhaps,” and left Elerâmâ to examine the story over and over again, searching for any sign of a hint.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> * As it happens, many Hobbit tales begin the same way, but neither Elerâmâ nor her mother have ever heard of Hobbits—which is a shame, since at least one of them would likely have enjoyed Hobbit tales. Possibly both of them.
> 
> **Thaurond** —Sauron (Primitive Quendian)
> 
> **Anār** —a Primitive Quendian name for the Sun, derived from the root ‘anár-.’  
>  **Balī** —the Valar (singular: Bálā) (Primitive Quendian); derived from the root ‘BAL-‘, meaning ‘power’  
>  **Cuiviénen** —‘Water of Awakening’ (Quenya); the lake in Middle-Earth by which the Elves (then composed of the Minyar, Tatyar, and Nelyar) first awoke.   
> **Hildórien** —‘Land of the Followers’ (Quenya); the land in the far east of Middle-Earth where Men first awakened at the beginning of the First Age.  
>  **Kwendî** —the Primitive Quendian name for the Elves, later adapted as the Quenya ‘Quendi’ (singular: Kwende)


	3. Chapter Three

Spring came in torrents of rain that gave way to clear, lovely blue skies and breezy air heavily scented with the perfume of thousands of flowers. Spring came to the forest sweetly, with mild weather and the promise of a good, fruitful summer and autumn to come. Those promises were made, but whether or not they would be fulfilled, Elerâmâ did not know, and would never know.

Elerâmâ was going on a trip.

Well, her parents were coming, too.

“Is that everything?” Mother called out to Father, who was coming down the steep hill with the last of the bags to be loaded onto their wagon.

They could not bring the wagon up to the house itself, for there was no break in the trees wide enough to get the wagon through, and the ground of the hill was uneven enough and thick enough with rocks that it was likely to do an injury to one of the wagon wheels. So Mother and Father had been huffing and puff all morning, carrying bags down the hill, while Elerâmâ, who had been assigned to carry only the most lightweight of objects and who had thus finished up long before they were done, sat in the driver’s seat, kicking her legs against the solid wall of the wagon and eyeing the horses hitched to the front with a mixture of curiosity and apprehension.

(She had never ridden a horse before; she’d never ridden any animal before. The whole thing seemed decidedly dubious, so Elerâmâ was glad that they would all be riding in the wagon, and avoiding the dubious pursuit of actually riding on an animal’s back. Yes, a lot of people in the stories Mother had told her rode on the backs of horses, but really, most of those people had been Exiles, and everyone knew that misfortune followed Exiles around everywhere they went like a thunderstorm that fixated on one part of the land in particular, and just never left. Anything the Exiles especially liked was just going to go wrong eventually, for anyone who tried it. That was just logic. Just like it was just logic for Elerâmâ to do everything she could to avoid ever riding on the back of a donkey or a horse. It sounded like a great way to wind up with a broken neck. Also, Elerâmâ couldn’t escape the thought that, after a while, bearing her on its back would hurt any donkey or horse she happened to be riding. Better to avoid that, as well.)

“Where are we going?!” Elerâmâ called out to her parents, for probably the twenty-fifth (she had been counting, but had lost track somewhere along the way) time since they had first announced they were going on this trip. She knew they were growing tired of it by now, but really, if they had not expected her to be curious, they _really_ had not been paying attention these last forty-two years.

“You’ll find out when we get there!” Mother called back genially, though heading down the hill just a little ways behind her, Father frowned—there was an opening Elerâmâ intended to exploit, if she was allowed the opportunity.

“ _Why?!_ ”

“Because not everything in life can be mundane, my daughter. Some things must simply be a surprise.”

“And why is that?” Father hastened forward to mutter in Mother’s ear. He was frowning down into her face, a mild frown, but then, all his expressions were mild, the departure from congenial contentment potentially physically painful for him. “I really don’t understand why you’ve made it such a secret for her.”

“Neither do I!” Elerâmâ piped up helpfully.

Mother looked between the two of them like a storyteller with particularly interactive members of the audience. Elerâmâ never had the slightest impression that her mother felt as if she was losing control of the situation, or had never had control to start with. It was impressive, yes. Sometimes, it happened to be infuriating, as well, though Elerâmâ found herself invariably forgetting any irritation she might have felt once Mother gave even the slightest explanation, no matter how incomplete or confusing.

“It is part of a truth she has yet to grasp,” Mother told them both airily. “If she does not understand by the time we reach our destination, then I will tell her. The truth will be less valuable for her having not uncovered it herself, but truth always has some intrinsic value, that nothing can take away.”

Elerâmâ did not like the idea of devalued truth, but the idea of finally knowing what this had all been about, finally having that one piece of information that would make everything make sense was certainly enticing. She would put special effort into trying to come to the truth while they were on the road, so that the truth would not have to lose any of its value.

Out of Mother’s sight, Father rolled his eyes, but an affectionate smile softened the edges of the gesture, stripping it of any real rancor.

As her parents loaded the last of their bags into their large, covered wagon, Father directed Elerâmâ to sit in an empty space down in the wagon, close to the driver’s bench where her parents would be perched. Sacks and chests towered all around her, barring the narrow path that led to the other end of the wagon. Elerâmâ felt a bit like luggage herself, sitting there. But there would be opportunities to get out of the wagon and walk alongside it; her father had told her that the wagon would not roll on quickly enough, even when led by a team of sturdy horses, for her to be left behind. She’d have little trouble keeping up with the wagon if she wanted to walk alongside it, so why not do that?

While Elerâmâ was trying to get comfortable, back pressed up against a bag of what felt like clothes, she heard her father mutter something more to her mother. But her mother only laughed, loud and bright and bell-like, and called out, “It’s time to go!”

Whatever her father might have said soon slipped away from any curious part of Elerâmâ’s mind. As the wagon began to roll down the narrow, winding road, taking Elerâmâ east out of the forest for the first time in her life, she could only dream of all the things that she might see, out in the wide world.

-0-0-0-

Elerâmâ soon found reason to walk alongside the wagon, rather than ride under the shade of the cover that protected their belongings from the elements. The weather had been fair, mild during the day and only taking on a real chill after night had fallen—and only a chill that could be easily banished by a campfire, at that. The sky never gave any sign of rain stronger than the occasional drizzle, that which lingered for ten minutes, perhaps fifteen, and then vanished like morning mist, the clouds dissolving to reveal Anār’s fiery face, once more.

The weather had been fine, light and breezy, ideal walking weather, really. But more than that, what drove Elerâmâ to get out and walk besides the wagon had far less to do with the weather than it did with the conditions within the wagon itself.

There were flaps at the back of the wagon that could only be latched open or shut from the outside. Elerâmâ’s parents had both decided early on that, if they were not retrieving something from the wagon, the flaps were to remain latched thoroughly shut. That left only the gap between where her parents rode on the driver’s bench for a view of the outside world, and it was a narrow one, indeed, consumed almost entirely by blue sky and dusty road. Yes, the sky was a very pretty shade of blue, but even it could become tiresome after enough time being able to see little but it and the road, which was not especially pretty, nor memorable in any real way. Elerâmâ had no idea how long this journey was going to take, and the idea of seeing nothing of a world she had only known from stories in the meantime was intolerable.

She was not alone in walking alongside the wagon, rather than riding in it. Oftentimes, Elerâmâ was accompanied by one of her parents, who had ever enjoyed walking and who, Elerâmâ realized with a jolt, might have gone on many journeys like this one before she was born. (She wondered if either of them had gone down this particular path before. Mother, at least, must know the answer to the secret. Did Father know, as well? What places had they been to? What fantastical sights had they laid eyes on? What strange foods redolent with strange spices, neither the ingredients nor the seasonings of which could have bene found in the forest where they had lived together, had they eaten? What people had they spoken to? Elerâmâ had so many questions, and stewed in the frustration of not knowing whether or not her questions would be responded to with a sing-song “That’s a _secret_.”)

Elerâmâ was rarely unaccompanied when she walked alongside the wagon. Father would walk with her sometimes, teaching her simple traveling songs and sometimes sweeping her up onto his shoulders so that she could get a better view of the surrounding countryside, thought that arrangement could never last for very long. “You’re getting heavy, Elerâmâ!” he’d tell her with an easy smile. “Soon, I’ll be asking you to hold me on _your_ shoulders.”

Mother would walk with her from time to time as well, a little more frequently than did Elerâmâ’s father, as Mother was not so good with the horses and seemed almost nervous around the animals, though Elerâmâ was not quite certain that ‘nervous’ was the correct word for it. She had never known her mother to be nervous. She was not certain that she would have been able to recognize the emotion in her mother’s strong-boned, tawny face, let alone her starlit gray eyes.

Whatever it was Elerâmâ was seeing in her mother’s face and her eyes as she navigated past the horses to come and walk at Elerâmâ’s side, it did not last long. (Perhaps not nervousness after all, then. To Elerâmâ, nervousness did not make sense as a fleeting emotion.) Instead, Mother would point all around them at every feature of the surrounding landscape, directing Elerâmâ to look closely.

“We are not gone from the forest where you lived your life, my daughter, and you look upon the wider world for the very first time.” Mother turned her gaze away from Elerâmâ momentarily, her lips curling in a smile of indecipherable quality as the wind caught a few loose locks of black curls, leaving them to flap back and forth across her face like a raven’s wings. “Many of the stories we well were taught to us, and we may find we need no more than that. But the wide world contains countless sources of inspiration, and we would be foolish to cut ourselves off from these sources of inspiration, just because they do not happen to feature directly in a story you have told. Stories grow in the telling. Stories grow with age. They are also capable of tremendous change. So look closely at everything around you, Elerâmâ, and do your best to drink it all in, and remember.”

Elerâmâ scarcely needed encouragement. She had been so eager to see these new lands, formerly known only from stories, that she had climbed out of the wagon at nearly every opportunity she got, after all.

For the first many, many miles, Elerâmâ did not know how to well and truly tell the distance in terms of such units, but she knew that it had been the better part of a day, the land had still been steep and hilly, the road forced into snakelike curves and dips to accommodate for steep descents and sheer cliffs.

But then, while still densely forested, the land slowly began to smooth itself out. The first night that they had found themselves sleeping under the stars, they had been camped on the crest of a great hill, overlooking a stream far below. The darkling waters twinkled as they poured over boulders and down the winding trail that would, most likely, lead it to the creek so near to Elerâmâ’s home. From the crest of the hill, Elerâmâ could not hear what noises it made, those sounds so near to intelligible speech that Elerâmâ often caught herself trying to listen to it, convinced she would be able to understand what the voices said if she just listened a little _harder_. But she could hear the noises of the water that, to peoples other than the Kwendî, were the sum of the noises water made and that, from this distance, was enough.

Alright, so it wasn’t _actually_ enough, and Elerâmâ would likely have gone down the steep face of the cliff to listen at a closer distance had either her parents been amenable to the idea or the face of the hill not been so very steep that the journey back up would have been arduous and maybe so exhausting that she would have needed one of her parents to make their way to her and get her. Elerâmâ had not felt like exerting that sort of effort—either her own, or that of her parents.

The first night they had camped and slept under the stars, the land had still been steep and hilly and, in some places, quite treacherous. But then, on that second day, the land had indeed begun to smooth itself out. The hills rolled more gently, like ridges and troughs in a mass of dough her mother was trying to make into a loaf of bread, except the variegated greens of the forest were far more appealing to look at than the poisonous blue of the mold that would sink its veins into what should have been good bread and make it good only for tearing into little pieces and giving to the birds. (Elerâmâ supposed she could have compared veins of mold to veins of water flowing along the surface of the land like blood dripping away from skin, but comparing water to mold was intensely unfair to water. She did try to be fair, truly.)

Though the trees were just as tall and just as lush as they were in the high, steep hills of Elerâmâ’s home, the land was giving up its rough and tumultuous character. They were entering a gentler land, a land that invited farmsteads and sprawling towns and gardens whose plants were not nearly piled on top of each other as the plants in Elerâmâ’s mother’s garden was. (The owners of those gardens no doubt spent considerably less time trying to keep their mint patches from swallowing whole the rest of the garden. Or maybe that was just as much of a concern when you had a large, flat space to plant your garden on. Elerâmâ could not have told you; few of the tales she had been told ever touched too closely on the finer details of people’s gardens.)

The streams and creeks had begun to flow more slowly, with fewer white caps of foam swirling in their depths. These spoke with a strange voice, even by the standards of water. Their voices were dull—lazy, even—and were deeper and older-sounding than the not-quite-intelligible voices Elerâmâ had grown up with to this point. They sounded like distant cousins to the streams of her home, at best, and in reality they could have been complete strangers, completely unrelated.

That… That bothered Elerâmâ, if she was being very honest. Of all the things that could have bothered her, all the things in the whole, wide world, that this was what was bothering her was, itself, a bother. She did not see why she should be bothered by the water, when it was yet water and it was so utterly beyond her power to change or influence in any way. But water was one of the great constants of the world. Even in the vast deserts, Mother told her, water could be found, if you knew where to look for it, and when. Even in the deserts, there were sometimes storms. So the idea that this water could be completely different from the water at home, the idea that it could come from elsewhere and could have nothing to do with the streams or the creeks or the river of home, that did not sit well with Elerâmâ. It did not sit well with her at all, the idea that the spirits lived in the waters they passed by now, the waters they drank from now, could have absolutely nothing to do with them.

These thoughts clung to her like ashes from a fire clung to clothes. They clung to her like a shadow clung to the face of Ranā in the depths of winter. And like such things, with a little effort, they were shaken off and left behind, to be resumed at a later time, when ashes and shadows were hers once more.

After another day or two, the trees began to change. This bothered Elerâmâ considerably less, since trees had never been a special preoccupation of hers. Trees, Mother had told her, were very different the world over. Water was water wherever you went, but trees appeared in as many different forms as there were stars in the sky above. As the land became gentler, the trees too became smaller, their branches stretching out further from their trunks, leaves tender even after the first thaws of spring, glossy and delicate, reflecting sunlight like water.

_Will we see the shepherds?_ Elerâmâ asked her parents, as she looked at these smaller, and to her eyes, more vulnerable, trees.

Father ‘hmmed’ in his throat, but Mother shook her head vigorously. _I do not think so, my daughter. The shepherds are long gone from these lands. They sought the westlands on the borders of the sea, long ago, now._

_Did you know them?_ Elerâmâ asked, a frown creasing her lips.

_Long ago, I knew everyone there was to know_ , Mother responded with an almost offhand laugh. _Well, everyone who was worth knowing. But I did not know them._ She stared ahead, her gaze drifting absently towards the horizon. _I did not know them._

The clearings became wider and more frequent, until it was more that the landscape consisted of clearings punctuated by copses of trees, rather than forest punctuated by the occasional hollow. The air was full of the scent of grass, a smell Elerâmâ had never been able to describe as anything but ‘green,’ though she hoped that one day, her capacities would be broader and deeper and she would have other things she was capable of calling the smell. There were little flowers everywhere, flowers with yellow faces and white petals fanning out from them like the rays of stars as patterned on a blanket, pinkish-purple flowers with strange, ruffled petals, red flowers that held themselves almost like a closed bud at night. The last of these were tulips, Mother told her, and they had originally come from somewhere further south, and came in every color Elerâmâ could imagine, barring the likes of green and brown and black.

One thing that never changed, in all the days that they had already spent on the road thus far, was the stars. The stars were the same. When Elerâmâ pointed this out to her parents, her father told her that they would have to go far, far further away from home before the stars started to look truly different.

Mother, meanwhile, leaned over Elerâmâ and remarked, “But the stars have changed before, many times, and they have ever done so with great suddenness. Barádā, she who is so—“ Mother’s smile wobbled, faltering a long moment “—she who calls herself Star-Queen has on more than one occasion crafted new stars and just tossed them into the sky, with no warning, and not even with the attempt to furnish new star-maps for our use once she rendered all the old ones completely useless.

“Those stars were very pretty, it is true. And they remain pretty to this day. Whatever else might be said of Barádā, she does fine work when she puts her mind to it. But let us hope that she alters the landscape of the sky no further. Can you imagine the outrage and despair of astronomers and map-makers the world over, if she never let them have a sky that would stay familiar, forever?”

It was to this tune that they made the journey for the first few days, while Elerâmâ yet attempted to absorb and store away the differences of the lands that they passed through on the way away from home and towards whatever mystery destination her mother felt would explain everything that they were heading towards.

Elerâmâ had not been paying too much attention to the animals who made their presence known, close to the side of the road. She would start on that, next.

-0-0-0-

Nearby a wagon, nearby grazing horses, beside a campfire that popped out sparks that drifted up towards the sky like they thought they were stars and they should go up into the sky to bedevil astronomers and map-makers who just wanted the sky to stop changing:

“Tell me a story about the stars.”

Mother’s face looked strange when illuminated by firelight. She looked always as though the fire was lighting her skin from within, her bones on fire and the flames slowly smoldering beneath her skin, ready to set her entire face on fire. It was all like that, but less frightening than the actual thing would have been. Elerâmâ looked into her mother’s face, and she saw more light there than she would ever have thought there should be, just based on the amount of light put off by the fire. She saw a light that burned from within, as the lights of Anār and Ranā burned from within, needing no further illumination than what they were able to put off themselves.

(It was a different light. Elerâmâ would learn later of the pure, sterile light put off by everything made by the Balī, and anything that reflected that light. The light that poured from her mother’s face when it was illuminated by firelight was not pure. But that was alright. Something that was pure was untouchable and unmovable. Elerâmâ did not think she could have ever loved something that was pure. Well, perhaps she could. But the love would have forever been tainted by something nameless that was close kin to fear, and that would have been as good as feeling no love at all.)

Mother’s face looked strange when illuminated by firelight. It was not that she did not look like herself when in such a state, but that she looked _more_ like herself than Elerâmâ would have thought was possible, and thus became sometimes just a touch difficult to recognize. Father never looked this way when his face was lit up by a fire. Neither did anyone down at the village, when Elerâmâ had had occasion to be there past dark, when fires would be lit for illumination and warmth. Elerâmâ could only assume that _her_ face did not look like that when she sat near to a fire, though she might otherwise appear as her mother did, except in a child’s form. It was just her mother who looked this way. Just her mother who appeared as if burning from within.

Elerâmâ wondered sometimes if others also realized that her mother was very much not the same as the rest of them. She wondered if someday, she would piece together why this was, or if her mother would finally put her out of her misery and tell her. (She did not like the idea of devalued truth. Her curiosity was stronger than this dislike, though.)

“You wish for a story of the stars?” There was a drag on her mother’s voice, as if exhaustion was dragging her words to the ground and leaving them to lie in the dust. But that wasn’t right. Mother was sitting up perfectly straight, her shoulders even and motionless, without the tremor of exhaustion. Her eyes were yet gray and starlit and bright, perfectly alert, as if she was freshly risen from a long and restful sleep. “Is that what you wish for?”

Her shoulders just a little stiff, Elerâmâ nodded. “Yes.”

A smile fluttered over Mother’s lips before disappearing. She looked to where Father was standing in the dark, minding the horses while they grazed, and Elerâmâ thought she would call Father to come and join them, but no such entreaty was ever sent to the air. “You know, something strange occurs to me. The stars are so important to us. They are what we first saw when we awoke by Cuiviénen. To them, we have ever given our love. Without them, I am not certain we would be the same people that we are today; I think we would be…” Her brow furrowed “…diminished, somehow. And yet, we have so few stories related to the stars themselves. Do you know, in my whole life, I’ve only ever heard of a handful of them? _Me_. My roots go back further than the roots of most mountains, and I think I’ve heard of less than twelve tales of the stars in my entire life.”

Elerâmâ’s heart sank. “Does that mean you don’t have any to tell me?”

Mother snorted, then winked. “I never said _that_ , my daughter. I have not been on this earth for as long as I have to have come away so empty-handed. For everything which you will find on this earth, I have at least one tale to tell.” She smiled crookedly. “Though that may be the very last tale I tell, once I find myself running out of topics. That is the fate of the immortal, after all; eventually, you _will_ run out of things to talk about. We call ourselves Kwendî; speech failing me could very well prove fatal.”

Elerâmâ grimaced, staring down at the fire.

“Ah, but I’m getting off track,” Mother said easily, most likely sensing her child’s discomfort. “You wanted a tale about the stars, and I do have a few. I’ll tell you one, now.

“In the beginning, there were the stars that Barádā set forth when the world was yet new, and the Kwendî had yet to awaken. In those days, there was no matter of stars that were larger or smaller, stars that were brighter or dimmer, stars that were more or less glorious. All stars were made equal, in those days, and there were no differences among the stars to divide them from one another. Their purpose was to light the sky of perpetual night, their purpose was to enhance the loveliness of the earth and to be lovely, themselves, and in these purposes, they were perfectly content. They knew no reason why they should not be. They knew of no other thing it was possible for them to be.

“But then, there came a time when Barádā was no longer content with the number of stars that shone in the sky, nor in the degrees of brightness and brilliance and loveliness that were theirs. She had grown bored with the sky as it was, and as it was within her power to alter its landscape, alter the canvas upon which this ineffable painting had been wrought, she saw no reason why she should not make some changes. The sky was _her_ charge, was it not? Why should she not make changes?

“So Barádā set to work creating stars that would be superior to those stars that had come before. Stars that were all equal pleased her not; she wished for there to be certain stars in particular that were superior to all others. Barádā wished for there to be stars that could serve as her crowning glory, as her masterpiece, as the greatest example of what she was capable of as a creator, and she wished for them to hang in the sky where everyone could see. Oh, part of that was because she wanted everyone _else_ to know what she was capable of as a creator, as well, but Barádā _was_ an artist, and part of being an artist is that you wish for your art to be enjoyed by others, as well. Say what you will about Barádā, but she did wish to make the world a little lovelier for the sakes of everyone else who lived in it, as well as her own. Art observable by only herself did not bring her joy, for her greatest joy was in sharing it with others.

“Barádā made these stars using water from the trees of life in the Uttermost West. She made them with diamonds and citrines and sapphires and rubies. She made them with gold and silver and the finest glass. She made them with the secret magic of the Balī, that which was then and remains today utterly beyond the ken of the Kwendî. She made them with all of those ingredients, and when she was done, she was quite pleased with the result. These stars, she felt, would surely outshine all other stars in the sky. These stars would be the loveliest stars ever to shine in the sky.

“There was just one problem with that: where _was_ she to put them?

“You see, the sky was full. There was no room for new stars in this sky; Barádā had already hung so many of them that there was not the space for so much as a single new one. And the size of the sky was fixed. To try to alter it, Barádā would have run up against the will of the ultimate architect of this world, and whether from respect or fear, she had no desire to circumvent the will of the architect. Another solution would have to be found.

“It was not easy for her, you know. Barádā _is_ an artist, and she possesses an artist’s attachment to the work of her hands. The idea of putting any of them away, out of sight, never to return to their original pedestal, that was almost physically painful for her. But it was the solution she had hit on, and thus, she chose to stretch out her hand, select a batch of stars at random, and cast them down to the earth so that she would have room for her new, brighter, prettier stars.

“That it was so difficult for her to make this decision was cold comfort for the stars who had been so unexpectedly knocked from what for untold years had been their uncontested place in the skies. This was the only life they had ever known, and in the blink of an eye, it had been stolen from them, never to be returned. They were stars that could no longer be stars, for stars had a set purpose that they could no longer fulfill, and if they could not fulfill their purpose, how could they be stars?

“In their desolation, they pled with Barádā to hang them back in the sky. ‘Please!’ they cried to her. ‘Have we not done everything you asked of us? Have we not fulfilled our purpose faithfully? Why, now, do you forsake us? Please, we have done nothing but what you asked of us. Will you not give us the place where we have dwelled since time immemorial? Will you not give us another chance to be what we were born to be?’

“Barádā was unmoved by these arguments, but she was not totally without sympathy for the works of her hands. Though she would not return these forsaken stars to their place in the sky, she was willing, at least, to provide them with guidance:

“’To all things, there is a season, and to all things, there must eventually come an end. One day, this world will be broken and be remade in the image it should have portrayed all along. On that day, you stars will also be broken and remade, for try as I might to form you as was intended when the songs and stories that made our world were sung were yet untainted, I have not the power to alter what has been done. The song no longer runs as it ought to, and the works of my hands are never quite what they should be. You are not to blame. You bear no responsibility for it. And yet, you, too, will find that when the day comes when the world is broken, you will be remade, for the architect will hold you in their hands and find that you are unequal for the perfect world they seek to create.

“’To all things, there is a season, and to all things, there must eventually come an end. It was not right that the stars in the sky should all shine just the same, with no real distinction between them. There is no particular reason that I chose you to leave the sky behind to make room for my new stars. It could have been any star in the sky who was chosen. It was by complete chance that it happened to be you.

“’You may not shine in the sky any longer, but I will not shut you away from the world for all time. You are yet the work of my hands, and I have no desire to see your beauty vanish out of the world. I give you the freedom to live in the world, and to decide for yourselves what you should be, when you can no longer be stars. I ask only that you do not spend the rest of your long lives mourning what you can no longer be. Go, and discover for yourselves what new purpose may bring you joy, in a world where you can be anything.’

“Barádā sent the former stars from her sight, and was silent.”

And then, Mother was silent, staring down into the fire, her eyes unreadable, slightly glazed over.

Elerâmâ frowned at her mother, tilting her head to one side as an emotion that managed to be the confused combination of curiosity and concern squirmed inside of her. “Is… Is that it?”

“Indeed, it is.” Mother replied to her so promptly and so smoothly that Elerâmâ wondered what that strange, glazed stare even was, for it clearly hadn’t indicated any loss of concentration or failure to listen. “Not every story has a well-defined ending. Some of them just…” She waved a hand through the air “…stop. And in this case, at least, there was a purpose for it just stopping.”

Just based on past experience, Elerâmâ could guess that this was where she was supposed to chime in. “Is there an archetype for stories that just stop?” she asked hesitantly. A breeze rippled from the east, cutting into her skin like the edge of a knife. She inched closer to the fire as she went on, “I’ve never heard of any archetype like that.”

Mother clicked her tongue. “That is not what I meant, my daughter. Some stories are left like this, because they are meant to be open-ended. They are constructed in such a way as to encourage the listener’s imagination to go down as many different paths are there are branches on a tree. And I… Hmm.” She brushed a lock of hair back behind her shoulder. “Perhaps I have made these things into too much of a lesson, these past few days. I did not mean to turn this story into a lesson. Not so close to your bedtime, anyways.”

Elerâmâ puffed out her cheeks. She’d really hoped her mother would have forgotten about that…

(Though _why_ she did, when her mother _never_ forgot about bedtime…)

Just then, Mother rose to her feet in a swish of soft clothes and softer hair, and came to sit at Elerâmâ’s side. She stretched out her hand and smoothed down Elerâmâ’s hair, which had become wind-blown and tangled from a long day on the road. “All I wished to teach you tonight,” she murmured, her voice barely audible over the pops and crackles of the fire, “is that there are some stories without endings, and some characters who do not have their whole lives mapped out by the pen or the word. We can fly over the edge of the page, can disappear from the storyteller’s voice, and yet live. Sometimes, we can even live happily.” She leaned down, whispering against Elerâmâ’s hair, “Never forget that. No matter what, never forget that.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Barádā** —Varda (Primitive Quendian)
> 
> **Anār** —a Primitive Quendian name for the Sun, derived from the root ‘anár-.’  
>  **Balī** —the Valar (singular: Bálā) (Primitive Quendian); derived from the root ‘BAL-‘, meaning ‘power’  
>  **Cuiviénen** —‘Water of Awakening’ (Quenya); the lake in Middle-Earth by which the Elves (then composed of the Minyar, Tatyar, and Nelyar) first awoke.   
> **Kwendî** —the Primitive Quendian name for the Elves, later adapted as the Quenya ‘Quendi’ (singular: Kwende)  
>  **Ranā** —a Primitive Quendian name for the Moon, derived from the root ‘ran-‘ meaning ‘wander, stray.’


	4. Chapter Four

By the time Anār rose over the almost bizarrely flat eastern horizon and they were ready to be off again, Mother was just the same as she had been before they settled down the night before. She was light and airy as she ever was in the morning, behaving as though the previous night had never occurred, but Elerâmâ was not struck down with the same amnesia. She could not forget. It was not in her nature to forget.

But whatever was or was not in her nature, there was little Elerâmâ could do about it. Her mother would not speak of it, would not even acknowledge it, and her father had not witnessed it, having been standing far enough away with the horses that he neither saw nor heard any of it. She alone had both witnessed what happened last night, and was willing to acknowledge that it had occurred at all.

It had been strange. It was strange in a way that would not leave Elerâmâ alone, though she did not know why. There were so many things she did not know, and thus, as they made their way down the road that day, Elerâmâ did not climb out of the wagon to walk alongside it as had become her custom, but instead sat ensconced in the back of the wagon, under the canvas, and tried to sort out her thoughts.

If nothing else, it was certainly a day for thinking. A gray, steady rain had been drumming upon the oiled canvas of the wagon since just a little time after dawn, unabating. It was not a proper storm, even. There was no wind, no lightning, no thunder, no hail. Just the rain, drumming a steady ‘tat-tat-tat-tat’ rhythm upon the canvas.

Her parents had been silent since the rain started. They had drawn the oiled cloaks they had packed for such an eventuality about themselves, cowls yanked as far down over their face as they would go, and just set their will to driving the wagon on and on down the increasingly muddy road. If the road eventually became so muddy that the wagon wheels—and maybe the horses’ hooves, as well—became mired in the greedy, gulping earth, perhaps they would be persuaded to speak, then, even if what came from their mouths was only profanity and other things that could not be repeated, but otherwise, Elerâmâ had a feeling there would be no interruption to her ruminations, today.

She… She really did not know a whole lot about her mother. Truth be told, Elerâmâ was not possessed of a wealth of information regarding her father, either, but her father did not feel like a mystery, the way her mother did. Her mother felt like a collection of questions, each more bewildering than the last, that had no answers that Elerâmâ could see. They were lurking just out of sight, just out of hand’s grasp, and moved too quickly in the water for Elerâmâ to seize upon any of them.

Last night had been… interesting. She’d never seen her mother get quite like that, before. Elerâmâ thought she had seen the edges of such a mood, sometimes, but she had never seen the mood in full.

Elerâmâ liked to think that, when she was older, she would understand her mother a bit better. When she was a grown woman whose face could serve as a mirror for her mother’s, she would understand all of this. Her mother would no longer be a tangle of questions with no answers, but she would be like a story, where the answers were clearly visible in the narrative, for those who had the eyes to see them. Or perhaps, when they reached their destination, this answer to a truth she had yet to grasp, at least by her mother, it would all make sense, _then_.

Elerâmâ certainly hoped that, one way or another, there would come a day when she _understood_. She did not like to think that, for the rest of their long, long lives, her mother would forever be a mystery to her. To be a mystery was to have a barrier separating yourself from the rest of the world. To be a mystery to a person is to have a wall separating you and them, so that your hearts can never truly touch, no matter how much you both might strain.

_I do not want walls between us. I do not want for there to be something that forever divides us, with no hope of ever surmounting it, no hope of ever meeting, face to face, heart to heart._

Well, Elerâmâ had a way to climb over that wall. Her mother had been trying to teach it to her for years, now, one way or another. She just had to weave some rope, and find a hook to attach to it.

It was the stories. Elerâmâ did not know in what way, but she knew that it was the stories. There was a truth in them that would serve as the answer to all of her questions, if she could just _find_ it…

Elerâmâ eyed her mother’s back, water dripping off of her oiled cloak in beads. There was a truth hiding somewhere beneath her mother’s skin, but she was not at this juncture naïve enough to assume that her mother would just _give_ her the answers. Mother might be a mystery to Elerâmâ, but what she had been allowed to know, she _knew_. Mother would be much happier if Elerâmâ came to the truth on her own, and thus, she was not going to give Elerâmâ _any_ hints.

_I want to know you._

Was that not true of any child, when thinking of their mother? By this time, Elerâmâ had heard many tales that featured unhappy mothers, or unhappy children, or both, really, but she had little doubt that within ever unhappy child there was at least the desire to _know_ their mothers. Even if their mothers had done great evils against them, they would at least desire greater knowledge, so they could at least know _why_ those evils had occurred. Even when the only connection between them was harm, Elerâmâ could not conceive of wronged children not wishing to know why the harm had occurred.

_I want to know you._

And some day, she would. One way or another, she would. But Elerâmâ would not know her mother unless she made the effort, and she wasn’t making an effort by fretting about how she didn’t know her mother. She sighed and shifted her weight against the lumpy sack of clothes that had served as a back cushion. The rain was giving absolutely no sign of letting up. She’d have plenty of time to think, today.

What she eventually came to think was that she should continue thinking about it, but if that her mother wasn’t going to acknowledge that strange turn, or any other strange turns that might come after it, it was useless to worry about it.

Elerâmâ would just keep trying to put things together.

-0-0-0-

One misty, silvery morning, they came upon something Elerâmâ had never seen before: a town.

Oh, yes, there had been the village where her father came to sell or barter his game, or her mother would occasionally trade a quilt or a bundle of herbs from her garden for some other desired materials, but this was something else, entirely. When they visited the village, Elerâmâ could see the far edge of the village from the side they had entered from. When they visited the village, there was not a single person there whom Elerâmâ did not know, and not a single building or animal to be found there that had not long since become completely ingrained upon her memory. Everything about the village had been completely familiar. None of it had ever been strange to her eyes.

This was something else completely.

Elerâmâ had first spotted the town from the little plumes of black smoke rising up into the air, stark and ugly against the soft, indistinct mass of the mist that had rolled up from the river Elerâmâ could hear flowing far off in the distance. Someone had a fire going, except there were far more plumes of smoke than she had ever before seen at once.

_A forest fire?_ she asked fearfully.

Father shook his head. _A town, Elerâmâ. There are many mouths to feed in a town, and many bodies that must be kept warm. That goes even stronger when you deal with Men, for their bodies are frailer and more vulnerable to hunger and to the cold than are ours._

A town of _Men_. Now, that really did get Elerâmâ’s attention. She had never laid eyes on a child of Men in her life; none lived in the forest where she had lived her whole life, and their merchants never paid any visits to the village. Not only would she be seeing a town for the first time in her life, but she would be getting her first sight of those who were accounted the Kwendî’s siblings in the eyes of the architect who had made this world.

Elerâmâ climbed onto the driver’s bench, perched there between her parents. This made things a little close on the bench, but so long as neither of her parents complained about it, she was going to do her best to pretend that it wasn’t cramped at all. She wanted a better view of this town than what she could have gotten seated in the back of the wagon. She wasn’t going to let anything spoil it, if she could help it.

Soon, there came a more concrete preview of the town than those plumes of smoke rising from chimneys or fires burning out in the open air. Elerâmâ saw rooftops of mottled gray shale, stained and discolored by long years of exposure to sunlight and wind and rain and snow and hail. Something was perched atop one of the roofs, wobbling gently in the nearly-nonexistent breeze that was coming down from the north; after peering at it for several moments, Elerâmâ realized that it was a weather vane in the shape of a goose with its neck curved so that its beak pointed towards its breast. A few scant treetops poked out from between the gray roofs, warped and bent in such a way as to suggest that the houses had been there since before the trees, and the trees’ growth had changed to accommodate the structures that penned them in.

The smells hit her not long after the sight did, and it was…

Elerâmâ would call it fragrant. She would call it fragrant, and try not to too obviously wrinkle her nose as they were passing through the town. This was the first time she would ever lay eyes on Men, and she did not wish to make a bad impression, even if the smells coming from the town were…

She’d get used to it, she was sure. And once they were closer, she’d pick up on something more pleasant than what she was getting from this distance, surely. It was just important that she not make it too obvious that the less pleasant smells were _all_ she could smell, in the meantime.

Elerâmâ did not lay eyes on any of the Men in the village until they were within spitting distance of the outlying houses. Once they did, any evaluation of the town itself, the houses and shops and whatever else might be found there, dropped out of Elerâmâ’s head like a drop of rain falling out of the sky, dissolving into the earth, never to be seen again.

Many of the stories Mother had told her involved Men in some way. Though few of the tales of Men had featured them as the primary characters (barring, of course, the adventures of Tar-Telperiën in Númenor), Elerâmâ had heard of them enough times in the stories that she had long wanted to see how actual Men, in these modern days, held up to Men of yore, men whose deeds were great enough to see them become part of the tales of the Kwendî.

They were very similar in appearance to the Kwendî. That was the first thing Elerâmâ noticed about them. Dark-haired, dark-eyed, and possessed of skin in varying tones of fair and dark, they all looked very similar to the Kwendî Elerâmâ had known. Just based on their physical appearance, Elerâmâ saw nothing in them that could have immediately differentiated them from the Kwendî. For all she knew, some of the more distant figures, the ones she couldn’t get a good look at, very well _could_ be Kwendî.

But once she looked past their outward appearances, and how similar those outward appearances were to the Kwendî, the differences became more and more salient. It wasn’t anything Elerâmâ could put into words, not really. It was just a strong sense, when she looked at the Men in this town, that they were less rooted to the earth than the Kwendî. Alright, maybe Elerâmâ could put some of it into words: when she looked at the Men of this town, she felt a little as though if she was looking at spirits, rather than living people. She looked at them, and thought them ready to fly away in the slightest celestial breeze.

Elerâmâ quickly gathered that the Men of this town did not see Kwendî any more frequently than Elerâmâ saw Men. As her parents drove their wagon down what looked like the main street, many of the Men seemed to quickly realize that the three of them were not Men like them, and many of those stopped what they were doing to stare at them as they went past.

It was not… Elerâmâ drew a little closer to her mother’s side, without quite realizing what she was doing. She was being silly, but she did not think all of those stares were particularly friendly.

Elerâmâ could not have told you in what way the stares were not particularly friendly. Whenever she spotted one she thought was unfriendly, she averted her gaze too quickly to drink in anything that could have shed any light on it. She had heard more than enough tales of the ways Kwendî and Men interacted with each other. Whatever was at the heart of this, she thought she could guess.

Whatever the unfriendliness clearly felt by some of the townsfolk, they were not just passing through as quickly as possible, trundling down that main street until they were out of the town and putting it far behind them. After a certain point, Father stopped the wagon and got down off of the driver’s bench. “We need to pick up some more food,” he told Mother. “I’ll be back as quickly as I can.” He hesitated a moment, before going on, “Don’t go anywhere while I’m gone.”

“Take your time,” Mother replied lazily, as if there was not a miasma of almost-hostility growing thicker and thicker around them with each passing moment.

And so they waited, Anār rising higher and higher in the sky and the mist was starting to burn away, though the sky remained gray, pregnant with thick clouds that promised rain at a later time. Elerâmâ stared straight ahead, except when someone passed within her field of vision, at which point her gaze dropped to allow her to stare at her boots, instead. Was Father _really_ off getting food? _Here_? Could they not have just gathered more food once they were back out in the countryside, if they were really running low?

Beside her, Mother still didn’t seem to think anything was wrong, though she had slid her arm around Elerâmâ’s shoulders and Elerâmâ could just make out the pressure of her fingers pressing a little harder into Elerâmâ’s left shoulder than what was strictly speaking necessary. She said nothing to Elerâmâ. Not a reassurance that everything would be alright, not a confirmation that she was right to be worried, not a scolding for being too worried for the situation in, not even a silly little story to pass the time. She just sat at Elerâmâ’s side, perfectly straight, perfectly relaxed, except for the pressure of her fingertips on Elerâmâ’s left shoulder.

At length, Father returned with a few bundles tucked securely under his left arm. He loaded them into the back of the wagon quickly, but without any real sense of urgency that Elerâmâ could detect. As he reassumed his place on the driver’s bench, Mother asked him, “Any trouble?”

“No, none,” Father said to her easily.

That sounded like a lie, for the very simple reason that a lie made more sense. Elerâmâ could almost hear the hostility buzzing in the air, and was pretty sure that that new… _aroma_ that had greeted her nostrils while he was away was hostility given scent. Father having run into trouble just made so much more sense than this having been a simple, uneventful grocery trip. And given that Elerâmâ could feel the hostility of the townsfolk pressing in on her like a physical weight, lying that no, it hadn’t been any trouble made more sense than being honest about it. If this was a story, Father would be like one of those cannier characters who didn’t let on to the fact that they were on to their antagonists’ ill intentions.

But Father gave no acknowledgment of that. All he did was turn to Elerâmâ, smile gently, and tell her, “Elerâmâ, I’d rather you sit in the back for the rest of the day. I think it may rain later.

And since it did rather look like it would rain, Elerâmâ could not even use that as something to cement her own suspicions. She could only nod, too reluctant to speak to give verbal assent, and climb into the back of the wagon.

For the rest of the day, Elerâmâ could not help but note that her parents were driving the horses a little more quickly than usual.

-0-0-0-

And they kept on driving those horses more quickly than usual into the night, stopping only briefly to let the horses have something to eat, before driving them on again. They had stopped to camp just before night fell every night since they had left home, and the deviation from the normal pattern made Elerâmâ’s heart rattle in her chest. Mother and Father said nothing to her in the way of explanation, and neither had she heard them say anything to each other. Either they had communicated mind to mind, or else this was some previously hit-upon agreement, or else this was all Father’s doing, and Mother thought he had the right idea, or elsewise wasn’t willing to do anything to gainsay him.

From time to time, a single question bobbed up to the front of Elerâmâ’s mouth, over and over again. _Why?_ But no matter how many times it heaved its weight against the gate of her teeth, it never found a way past. She feared knowing. The fear felt like a betrayal, though whether a betrayal of her parents, or herself, Elerâmâ could not have begun to guess. The fear felt like a betrayal, and it felt like a part of herself so deeply ingrained that they would have had to kill her to dig it out.

She could not sleep. Darkness was falling thickly upon the land, but Elerâmâ could not find fatigue anywhere within her body or mind. Thunder rumbled discontentedly somewhere far off, Elerâmâ could not tell in which direction. To pass the time, Elerâmâ let her imagination drift, as regards to that thunder.

How easy it was to imagine the thunder as the footsteps of the Balī. Whenever they involved themselves intimately in the affairs of these lands, the result was widespread destruction—thunder was _easily_ the most appropriate comparison to make, in the absence of an earthquake.

In the thundering dark, heart clamoring in her chest like a bell clapper rapping endlessly against her ribs, the wagon riding into the night much faster and much further than Elerâmâ would have expected, it comforted her to imagine the thunder was the footsteps of the Balī. It was easy to imagine the three of them in some situation other than whatever this was, when she made the comparison, when she allowed her mind to sink into the depths of the comparison and the scenario. The Balī were waging another of their wars, and she and her parents were fleeing the destruction they wrought without even noticing. They were the unfortunate denizens of Beleriand in the First Age, and they were fleeing over the mountains into the east where they could be sure that the terrible beings that had come from the Uttermost West would not murder them in their heedless wrath.

Go east over the mountains, and they would be beyond reach.

Elerâmâ wished she could see any mountains through the gap in the canvas, so that it would make the scenario easier to sink into and forget herself in. As it was, Elerâmâ could only try to make herself comfortable against a lumpy bag of clothes as the floor rattled beneath her and her heart would not stop rattling in her chest, no matter how much she knew she must be tired, and sleep refused to come to the door in spite of the hour. Here was another mystery, no mistaking it.

It was that, in this time, it felt very much as though the mystery had teeth. Teeth that Elerâmâ could feel raking against her skin.

-0-0-0-

At last, when the darkness was as dense as thickest wool and the thunder had given way to a thick, watery silence, Elerâmâ’s parents stopped the wagon. But they did not unhitch the horses, did not light a fire, did not let Elerâmâ get out of the wagon.

“We aren’t stopping for very long, Elerâmâ,” Mother told her. Her voice was light, but the darkness was too complete for even the sharp eyes of the Kwendî to make out her face. There was just a mass of shadow where Mother’s face should have been, and Elerâmâ felt as if what she looked at was, indeed, faceless.

That was an odd thought. Elerâmâ frowned to herself, trying to dig it out, but it would not go.

“We just need to let the horses rest, a little while,” Mother was saying. “You should try to sleep while the wagon is still. The road from now on will be rough, and you will have difficulty sleeping in the wagon.”

“What are _you_ doing?” Elerâmâ asked in turn.

Mother did not answer her. Mother turned away from the gap in the canvas as if she had not heard.

Elerâmâ tried to sleep, achieving only a shallow, restless sleep, where dreams stalked like wolves in the shadows of the trees, out of sight and out of reach, all howls and flashes of livid yellow eyes.

She woke in the night, and through the gap in the canvas, she saw the twinkling of distant firelight. Her eyes were still bleary with sleep, and in the bleary dark, she could not tell how far away the light was from them, or how many individual lights there were.

The wagon began to move again, not long after that.

-0-0-0-

The next day carried on in much the same manner. The silence between her parents had taken on a nasty, almost poisonous edge. Elerâmâ could not tell who the poison was directed at, or if either of them was directing it at the other in particular, or if there was any poison at all, or if Elerâmâ’s clouded mind was conjuring things that were not there. Everything was yet so gray, the clouds a uniform, murky pewter that seemingly promised rain and yet never delivered on that promise, that threat.

Elerâmâ hoped it would not rain. If it rained, that would muddy the road and might succeed in miring the wagon wheels, costing them valuable time.

Why was she thinking about _that_ , in particular?

Elerâmâ stared uneasily at the back of her parents’ heads. Why was she thinking about that, indeed?

They did not stop for meals. Hunger was registering to Elerâmâ only remotely, something distant and weak behind the walls of anxiety and stomach-churning almost-nausea, and she felt far more keenly the oddity of the fact that they were not stopping, for they had always stopped to eat beforehand. They were not stopping, now. They kept right on riding, and Mother had remembered to pass Elerâmâ some food only as an afterthought.

Elerâmâ was stuck under the canvas cover, and thus, did not know exactly when it became clear that they were being pursued. Nor were her parents kind enough to provide her with the exact moment that _they_ realized it, for they were… She did not know what they were doing. She would never know what they had been doing. She could only assume that they were trying to stay calm, or that they were trying not to let on their cognizance of being pursued. Elerâmâ would only ever be able to guess at what they had been doing.

Elerâmâ did not know exactly when it became clear that they were being pursued. What she had was the prickling sensation of eyes and the sheer sensation of _presence_ , and that swooping feeling like a premonition telling her that they were no longer alone. How she had connected that to the idea of pursuit was something she could not sort out within herself. This was, as far as she knew, a public road. There could have been any number of travelers along its many, many miles, and they would have all been well within their rights to use it for its intended purpose. When Elerâmâ thought about it logically, she thought it might have been stranger that they hadn’t encountered any fellow-travelers before now.

It might have been stranger that they had always been alone, up until now. That it was the stranger of the two did not stop Elerâmâ from hoping that they could have gone back to being the only ones on the road. When it had been just the three of them, her and her mother and father, she had always felt safe. No anxiety had touched her. She had only been filled with excitement and curiosity regarding the mystery of their destination.

(She still wondered, even now, at the back of her mind, just where it was they were meant to be going. But now, the where of the destination seemed less important than the why of the journey. It had been so sudden, had come like a bolt out of the blue. And now, _now_ , Elerâmâ was wondering, just why it was they had left. Just why it was that they were going towards this mysterious place. She would wonder for that a long time, spiraling around it, just another question that would never have an answer and leave her to loop round and round and round a broken ring.)

They were being followed.

More than that, they were being pursued.

Elerâmâ did not know why. She could feel her ignorance exploring her flesh with its teeth.

Elerâmâ…

Elerâmâ…

For the rest of her long life, the life that lasted as long as the world lasted, she would wonder, over and over and over again, like a wheel spinning wildly on a track, why they had ever stopped the wagon. She would ask herself that question quietly. She would rage into water, demanding answers the water could not give her. She would bury it in her flesh, until it became as much a part of her as her blood and her bones and her viscera, inextricable. It would have company there. It would have quite a lot of company.

Mother whispered to her “Do not move from this place, do not make a sound,” choked and nearly silent, and then she was sliding off of the driver’s bench, alongside her father. They passed out of sight, and in the gray, in the dense gray of twilight, Elerâmâ could see no shadows through the oiled canvas, could only hear footsteps on the muddy road outside, could only hear her heart pounding so wildly within her breast that she was sure it would burst, and could only try to keep her own breathing quiet enough that her presence would go unmarked by whoever it was who waited outside the wagon.

She would not see the moment.

She would never see the moment.

She knew that she had not seen it, and that what played through her dreams was simply the phantasm of an imagination that was trying to put images to what she had heard outside of that wagon, what she had heard from the confines of canvas and sacks and so many other things that could be no substitute for—

From her father, she heard a short, sharp cry.

From her mother, Elerâmâ heard nothing at all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Anār** —a Primitive Quendian name for the Sun, derived from the root ‘anár-.’  
>  **Balī** —the Valar (singular: Bálā) (Primitive Quendian); derived from the root ‘BAL-‘, meaning ‘power’  
>  **Kwendî** —the Primitive Quendian name for the Elves, later adapted as the Quenya ‘Quendi’ (singular: Kwende)


	5. Chapter Five

It was funny, the way a forest fire was funny. It was funny, the way a shipwreck was funny. It was funny, the way an avalanche was funny. Mother had told Elerâmâ so many tales in their time in this plane of the world together, so many that Elerâmâ had no doubt that, in her short years, she had absorbed more stories than many children of Men would in their entire lives.

It was funny, but though Mother had told Elerâmâ enough stories that, were stories drops of water, those stories would have filled a river, she had never told Elerâmâ what a corpse looked like.

Then again, it was also funny how, though Elerâmâ had heard many tales that involved the deaths of many, _many_ characters in those stories, she had never thought about the fact that her mother wasn’t describing their corpses after their deaths. It wasn’t as though she had ever particularly wanted to hear those corpses described, wounds and rot detailed for her horrified and not-even-particularly-fascinated ears. A glorious death made for excellent story fodder, but the tales rarely touched on what became of their bodies afterwards.

As Elerâmâ, stiff and shaking and hands slipping on every surface she tried to grasp at, slowly clambered out of the gap in the canvas, she was not thinking about corpses, not yet. She _was_ thinking about—

She was thinking about—

Her thoughts were forming a broken ring.

And because they were forming a broken ring, it did not occur to her until her feet were on the ground that whoever had been pursuing them could have still on the road _with_ them. Elerâmâ cringed, mouth utterly dry as she inched her way past the restive horses and pressed her back against the hard wood of the side of the wagon.

She did not want to look.

Elerâmâ was old enough to know that just because she could not see something, did not mean that something could not see her.

She still didn’t want to look.

But even as she was determinedly not looking, Elerâmâ could hear nothing, except for distant thunder and the less-distant susurrus of rain. She could hear no footsteps, no hostile shouts, none of what she would have expected if their pursuers were still here and they spotted the third member of her party for the third time. There was no one else around. She was alone.

She was alone with two dark lumps lying prone on the muddy road.

In the silence, the squelch of Elerâmâ’s boots against the mud was unbearably loud. The thunderous pounding of her heart was so loud that it deafened the world, so loud that if a thousand horsemen were riding down the road, coming to slay her, Elerâmâ did not think she would have known they were coming until she felt the first burst of pain from metal piercing flesh. In the silence, Elerâmâ kept waiting for any sign of those limp forms stirring, kept waiting for the rise and fall of breath, but no matter how she waited, the silence persisted, and they were yet still.

As Elerâmâ drew a little closer, she could smell something over the mud and the ponderous scent of approaching lightning and rain, something sharp enough to cut. As Elerâmâ drew a little closer, she felt her gorge rise in her throat, the phantom taste of bile souring her mouth.

Elerâmâ had never heard it described to her what the corpse of a Kwende looked like. She had never thought to ask. It had been, she would reflect later, a massive oversight, a failure of curiosity—there were others who could afford to go about their lives never knowing that, never even _thinking_ about that, but she had aspired to be a storyteller, and _she_ would need to know these things. To tell a story about death, she would need to know.

What Elerâmâ learned that day, knowledge dearly bought, knowledge she would have loved nothing more than to dig out of her mind and toss to the ground before trampling and burning it, was that the corpse of a Kwende was not that different from the corpse of an animal. You see, her father had been bringing game home whole more and more often, these past few years, for he wanted Elerâmâ to learn properly how to skin and joint and do all sorts of things to game, if ever a time came when she would need to catch all of her own food, completely unaided. It was not work that Elerâmâ particularly enjoyed, but her father had insisted, and her mother had thought also that it would be a good idea. So, regardless of whether or not Elerâmâ enjoyed t, she had been spending a lot of time plunging her hands into viscera.

The animal corpses her father would bring home, still whole except for the arrow wound or whatever wound from whatever trap had felled them, they all had a very particular look. When you ignored the wounds, if you looked at them but briefly, it was as though they could have still gotten up and walked away. There was, when you looked at them but briefly, so little difference between a living body and a corpse. When the corpse was fresh, it had yet to change colors or develop the foul odor of the decay. It could have so easily been a living body that happened to be asleep, if living bodies slept with their eyes open the way so many of those animals had had their blank, empty, glassy eyes open when her father bade her come closer.

Something wet began to drum on Elerâmâ’s shoulders and her back. It took her a long moment to remember that it was rain.

The animal corpses, those very fresh corpses, when you looked at them but briefly, you could have easily believed that they were still alive, and that the hunter who had brought them in had been mistaken regarding their state. But once you looked harder, once you really began to look at those corpses, it quickly became obvious that they were dead.

No breath left their mouths; their chests never rose or fell.

You could see the wounds if you really looked for them, could see the blood oozing from them in sluggish red trails that mixed with the earth beneath to form a coppery morass of mud and blood, something that could have sprouted an unusually thick growth of flowers if not for the fact that the blood would soon be trampled into the earth, as inextricable as knowledge was when lodged in the mind. You could see the wounds, and soon, so soon, it would be all you could see, even if it was something you did not want to look at, even if it was something that made the world feel like it was tilting sideways and everything was about to—

You could see wounds on corpses. Whether your mind wanted to accept the sight was completely irrelevant.

There were the superficial physical signs of death, the things that an eye that was not even trained could spot, if it was just willing to look. Or if it was unwilling to look, but could not be wrenched away. That happened, too. Sometimes, that happened a lot.

There was something else, as well, something that Elerâmâ could see perhaps only because she was a Kwende and was uniquely rooted to the earth in a way that the animals she’d skinned just hadn’t been. Or perhaps it was something everyone could see, and Elerâmâ only assumed it was an ability unique to the Kwendî because she had never known anyone who was not a Kwende. That was always possible. That was not something she particularly wanted to investigate.

When Elerâmâ looked at a corpse, it looked… empty. It looked like a box with holes cut out in the shapes of eyes, and when you looked into those holes, you could see absolutely nothing inside of the box. The box still had the shape of a box, and would retain that shape until the elements and decay and whatever insect thought the empty object most attractive came and warped it beyond recognition. But its purpose could no longer be fulfilled, for it was empty, and there was nothing in the world that could fill it once more.

The contents were gone. They had fled this plane of the earth. They had gone to water, gone to the water from whence all life had come, gone to the water where all the spirits of the Kwendî who were not stolen away by the Doomsman or some other, yet more malicious power, would now reside. They would sink into the depths of the waters of the earth, and be inextricable from it, and never make themselves known to Elerâmâ again.

These bodies would rot into the earth, and their spirits would sink into the water, and Elerâmâ would have nothing of them again, would never see her home again, would never, would never, would never, would never

Thought was not working as it ought.

The rain drummed on her back like the butts of spears, and for a moment, for a long, terrible moment, Elerâmâ could wish that they were, that there could have been bright, hungry metal to punch holes in her flesh to let her spirit leak out so that she would not have had to be _alone_.

Elerâmâ took another step forward, and then she could take no more. She was close enough now, she could see, she could see, she could _see_

She could go no further towards them. Her legs would not work, her legs were rooted to the ground like tree stumps made of lead, her eyes were wrenched on the sight, and she could have been a corpse herself for a time, for no breath was coming, no breath could be found in her lungs, her hammering heart had gone completely still, and those were the qualities of a corpse, were they not? No breath, no heartbeat, and Elerâmâ even felt as though she was emptying out, as if her body was empty of anything and everything that could have served as proof of life.

She stepped backwards, almost mechanically, and found that when she moved _away_ , she could move with no difficulty. She went back to the wagon, legs wobbling with increasing violence until she finally collapsed against the side and fell to the ground. Once there, she saw no point in getting up. She saw no point in getting up, ever again. Elerâmâ sat in the mud as the rain fell down, down, down upon her, gray and cold and dead and silent, and for a long time, she knew no more.

-0-0-0-

Later, she would not know how much time had passed. It could have been an hour or two, or it could have been many hours, or days or weeks or months. Time had not been working the way it ought to have been. Time had just not been working. Elerâmâ never noticed the sky growing brighter or darker, but then, neither had she noticed when the rain finally stopped. She had not felt hunger, she had not fallen asleep as far as she knew, though for all that Elerâmâ knew, she could well have been asleep the whole time, for the world was the same swirling gray mass the whole time, without any relief to the dullness of its hues, with no sound of wind or sight of animals crossing the road. She could have been asleep.

For all Elerâmâ knew, she could have been dead, as well.

For all of those reasons, Elerâmâ had no idea how much time had passed. And of all the things she cared about, and in coming days, when the world was no longer a swirling gray haze, she would come to care about a great many things once more, she would never care about this. The amount of time that had passed would never rise to the level of importance. It would drop off into the abyss at the back of her mind, filed away with everything else that had never been, and would never be, important.

Elerâmâ first became aware of herself once more when a noise tickled her ears, a rattling of wood and horses’ hooves and voices. Full awareness was coming back to her in bits and pieces, for though she could hear, she could not properly comprehend, could not connect a reaction to the sounds. Logically, she should have responded to the approach of newcomers with _some_ sort of emotion. Whether it was relief that someone had come, someone who could possibly _help_ her, or it was alarm that her parents’—that the _pursuers_ had returned, she should have felt something.

Should have felt something. Did not feel a single thing.

Elerâmâ did not look up as the noises drew nearer. She could not find it in herself to look up, to see who it was who was approaching. She could not find it in herself to care.

_Mother didn’t make a sound._

Mother could not now explain herself. Mother would never be able to explain anything, ever again. Father would never sweep her up onto his shoulders and joke about her carrying _him_ one day, ever again. They would never eat a meal together, ever again. There was little that mattered in the face of that.

So no, Elerâmâ did not look up.

She did not look up as the clatter of wood and horses’ hooves came to a sudden halt. She did not look up as those voices rose in volume and took on a staccato clamor of urgency. She did not look up as there came the drumming of feet pounding against muddy earth, or the splashing of feet in puddles. It did not matter, so she did not look up. She stared down at herself, at folds of cloth and a pair of boots with the toes pointing towards each other, at hands slick with water and brown and cold and numb.

Then, another hand, large and gloved, appeared at the edge of her field of vision, and Elerâmâ had no choice about looking up. It was difficult to do anything else, when someone was putting their hand under your chin and tilting your head up.

She was looking into the face of a Kwende—a man, she thought. Little of his features really sank in with her mind. All she really saw was brown eyes bright with panic and a mouth moving, forming words.

It was Sindarin. Elerâmâ knew it was Sindarin, and her studies in the language had progressed far enough that perhaps, on some happier day, she would have understood what he was saying. But this was not a happier day, and Elerâmâ could not imagine a happy day ever gracing her again. She stared dully at his face as he spoke words that sounded to her ears like the densest gibberish.

Eventually, the man seemed to realize that she was not really understanding _anything_ he was saying. His face screwed up, and he asked, in faltering Nandorin, “Are you hurt?”

She could not rouse herself to speech. She shook her head, instead. The denial felt like a lie. It wasn’t, and yet, it was.

The world was coming back into focus, bit by bit, however unwelcome such might have been. The man was hoisting her up to her feet, hands under her elbows. Those hands were shaking, and transferred to her shoulders once she was upright, tight on her shoulders as if he feared she would flee, or would just disappear into the ether (The way her parents’ spirits had disappeared into the water). He had pulled her up in such a way that their backs were both turned to the _lumps_ lying motionless a little ways further down the road, but really, the man need not have bothered. Elerâmâ would never have willingly looked their way again.

They weren’t her parents, not anymore. They could give her no comfort, give her no protection, give her no love. Those were empty vessels, and wherever her parents were, they were gone, gone, gone, so far out of her reach that she could journey the whole world over and be no closer to them than she was now. They weren’t her parents, but they yet wore their faces. Elerâmâ didn’t want to look at them. She didn’t want to see them. She wanted to go to bed and wake up finding that this had all been a dream.

The world was rarely kind enough to give us what we want. A world governed by forces who insisted upon dominion over lands they had wrecked and ruined and drowned in the sea was not a particularly kind place. And death? That was final.

The world was coming back into focus, and a consequence of that was that Elerâmâ could see where the man had come from. There was another wagon a ways down the road, smaller than the one she had shared with… smaller than the one she had come from and made entirely of glossy dark wood, rather than pale wood and creamy canvas. It was being drawn by two horses, rather than four, and when Elerâmâ ventured to strain her ears, she thought she could hear someone moving around inside of the part of the wagon hitched up behind the driver’s bench.

When the man called out in Sindarin, things had progressed to the point where Elerâmâ could once again understand the language.

“This one’s still alive!” he was shouting. “I…” He faltered, and Elerâmâ, without looking up, could hear him swallowing hard, a thick, sick sound like choking. “The little girl’s still alive.”

At that, Elerâmâ heard a door swinging open, so fast and so hard that there was a swoosh of air quickly followed by the slamming of wood against wood. A woman appeared around the back of the wagon, hurrying towards them on long legs and swift feet.

Where Elerâmâ drank in the man’s appearance only in bits and pieces that remained yet fragmented in her mind, the woman she saw clearly, and all at once, and the image remained stamped in her mind as if branded there with a burning iron. That, she felt she could be forgiven for, for even in the depths of her numb, empty despair, the woman’s appearance was so arresting that when eyes fell upon her, they became riveted, falling away from her only with the agony of tearing flesh away from a driven nail.

She was perhaps the tallest woman Elerâmâ had ever seen in her life, and even though Elerâmâ had seen relatively few women in her life, she could tell just by looking at this one that her height was exceptional. She was a splash of color in the gray land, a long, azure blue robe with floral embroidery and held shut with two rows of gold cloth buttons that met each other to form the shape of flowers over a scarlet dress. Her skin was milky-pale, except for cheeks that looked to have been chapped a bright red, and her hair was long and straight and the sort of shimmery gold that you would think only a princess in a fantastical story might actually have as a hair color. But what stood out the most, what made it truly difficult for Elerâmâ to tear her gaze away from this woman, that was her eyes.

From this distance, even as the woman was drawing closer and closer, Elerâmâ could not make out her eye color. Even as she drew close enough that, were she a woman from the village Elerâmâ had made visits to since earliest childhood, Elerâmâ _still_ could not make out her eye color. Light poured from her eyes as if they contained a multitude of stars, as if Anār and Ranā had been captured beneath the surface of her face and all their light was now contained within her eyes. It was like her spirit burned so brightly that her body should have been eaten by it wholesale, but her physical form was yet strong and clear and stable.

It was as beautiful as it was terrifying, and in the unmoored weightlessness of grief, all Elerâmâ could do was stare, unmoving, as the woman approached them.

Her terribly bright eyes lingered on Elerâmâ a long moment, giving her a feeling of being scoured and read, before they drifted to the face of the man. “Are you sure she’s the only one?” Her voice was not at all what Elerâmâ would have expected. She would have expected a voice as momentous and as memorable as those fire-bright eyes, but instead, her voice was normal. A little lighter and higher-pitched than Elerâmâ thought was typical in a woman of this woman’s height, and hushed, as if she expected brigands bearing axes and swords to burst from the surrounding countryside in their tens of thousands.

The man’s grip on Elerâmâ’s shoulders tightened. With a voice like a boulder falling onto the ground, “Yes.”

The two Kwendî walked back to the wagon, Elerâmâ in tow. Elerâmâ, too numb and too empty to resist, and even if she’d had it in her to resist, where else was she going to _go_ by herself?, allowed them to bundle her into the enclosed part of the wagon, a dark space with latticed windows, pale curtains over those windows, a bench on either side and dusty cushions on the benches. There were chests stowed under the benches; Elerâmâ tripped over the edge of one as she went to sit down.

There was a glint of fiery light from the woman’s eyes, winking out as the man shut the door on Elerâmâ, leaving her in the shadowy recesses of the back of the wagon.

Elerâmâ curled up on her side on the cushions, and began to shake uncontrollably.

From outside, she could hear vague snatches of conversation. “—shovel… the horses… ask her…” Elerâmâ did not bother to listen. She squeezed her eyes shut, finding them burning and wet.

She wanted to go home. She wanted to go home. She wanted to go _home_. She didn’t know how to get home. Home wouldn’t be home anymore, because home would be empty, home wouldn’t be home because her parents wouldn’t be there…

Elerâmâ wanted to go home. She wanted to go nowhere, she supposed.

Where she wanted to go was nowhere, so it didn’t matter much that these two strangers seemed to have other ideas.

For a few minutes, there was silence, peaceful silence, the silence of a grave buried deep within the earth. Elerâmâ lied there, her head against a dusty cushion, the grains of the fabric digging into the skin of her face. The dust smelled blunt and fuzzy, making her head buzz. Soon, it smelled of salt, as well, but that did not matter, did not matter at all. The cushions were not particularly thick, and the hard wood of the bench was digging into her back, making her spine ache. Elerâmâ did not move. She did not try to find any position on the bench that would have eased the pain. The pain was almost a comfort, as much as anything could be a comfort.

_She didn’t make a sound—_

That silence, peaceful or grave-silence, was not to last. The door swung open once more, letting in a too-brisk breeze and the light like fiery lamps of the woman’s eyes. The woman crept back inside, stepping as lightly as if she had entered a lion’s cage. Elerâmâ watched the wrinkled skirts of her robe and dress rustle and shift as she walked over and knelt down in front of Elerâmâ’s face. Though the light of the woman’s eyes was profound, it did not seem to light anything up. The only light in the wagon to have that effect was the faint light filtering in through latticed windows and pale curtains and layers and layers of swirling gray clouds. That faint light made the woman’s skirts glisten like water captured in cloth. Were the circumstances other than what they were, Elerâmâ might have been able to stare at the effect in fascination, trying over and over again to guess how the effect had been achieved, until she finally broke down and asked.

Elerâmâ’s breath caught in her throat as the woman knelt down before her, her pulse racing until she felt completely and unbearably _sick_. She couldn’t look directly into the woman’s face; the light in her eyes felt like it would burn, not the body, but the spirit behind it, burn the spirit, burn the mind, burn away what was left of her when she was left without a family and a home, leave her with nothing, leave her _as_ nothing, and the worst part was that it sounded almost pleasant, to be nothing, to be nothing was to be something that could not remember, could not _hurt_ —

Thought was still not working as it should. Elerâmâ was not certain when it would go back to working properly. She was not certain that she _wanted_ it to go back to working completely properly. If thoughts worked as they should, absolutely as they should, Elerâmâ was not certain that she could prevent their straight, logical paths from coming back to this place, coming back to a wagon and rain and a gray world and two lumps on the road oozing blood, was uncertain she could keep those paths from coming back to those places over and over and over again, and never leaving, not truly.

She thought that, as she was now, she might be able to sleep without dreaming. She thought that if she dreamt, she would not be able to remember it when she woke. She did not want her thoughts to lead her to lucid dreams that would remain trapped beneath the confines of her skin into the waking world.

There was so much she wanted. There was so much she did not want. The woman was not going to go away, just because Elerâmâ found the sight of her eyes too much to bear. Those eyes would only keep on burn, burn, burning, no matter how Elerâmâ tried to deny their power. She was lying on her side, so that one side of her face was mashed into a pillow and only her left eye drank in the world. As much as she was able, she set her eye to focus upon the woman’s face.

“So, you are awake,” the woman murmured. She reached out a hand, fingernails raking against Elerâmâ’s scalp as she smoothed Elerâmâ’s tangled hair away from her face. Part of Elerâmâ wanted to bat the hand away, but another part of her had to restrain a shudder and the urge to lean into the woman’s touch. Oh, how wonderful and terrible was a gentle touch, when the world felt as if it was falling into pieces.

Either the woman did not notice the war going on in Elerâmâ’s mind, or if she had discerned the turmoil, she chose not to acknowledge it. “Meldir is seeing to them, now; we will not leave them exposed to the air for the carrion-eaters to find, I promise you that.” Her delicately curved mouth quivered momentarily, before stilling. “Were they your parents?”

Still, Elerâmâ could not find it in herself to speak. The pillow coverlet rubbing uncomfortably against her chin, she nodded.

The woman’s brow furrowed deeply, until the smooth face of a Kwende more closely resembled the craggy peaks of a mountain. Elerâmâ wished she could more easily interpret the emotions that passed over her face like shadows over a naked flame, if only to give stability to a situation that seemed so very precarious, but they were just not registering to her, or else they were objectively inscrutable, and a closer acquaintance would not solve the problem. “I am…” The woman faltered, but that was a relief, for it meant that her fire-bright eyes were not directed at the floor, rather than at Elerâmâ. “I am so very sorry. Do you… Did you _see_ …”

In another world, perhaps Elerâmâ would have been content not to have seen it. In that other world, that it had all taken place offstage could have been comforting. The absence of concrete memories of the act itself could have stripped the reality of what had happened from the world, could have made it all feel like an unhappy dream, and could have blunted its sting in a mind returned from the gray land of numb despair and fully cognizant of the world once more.

In another world, perhaps Elerâmâ would have wanted to have seen it. Perhaps she would have wished to have the image seared into her mind like a brand, would have wanted to have as much of her parents as was possible in this other world, down to drinking of the bitter despair of their last moments. Perhaps she would have wanted to be with them, would have wanted to give them some comfort, though where could comfort be found in the face of the cruelty of a life that could have gone on to the breaking of the world, taken away by some heedless act of violence? Perhaps she could have gone out to them, and any last words or requests they might have had for her, she could have heard, and then fulfilled.

(Perhaps she could have had revenge. Perhaps she could have had justice. Perhaps she could have died with them.)

In another world, perhaps Elerâmâ could have been content with one or the other. But this was the only world she had been granted, and she could be content with neither of them. She wished she had been there, that she had seen it. She wished she had never climbed out of the wagon, that oiled canvas and lumpen bags and old, scratched chests and deep, humid shadows could have become the sum of her world, forever. She wished her heart could have fallen out of her body, so that she would feel nothing. She wished she could push the gray from the world, so that she would feel more keenly.

She could choose not to speak. That was the one thing she could do that felt right. Still lying on her side, feeling far too weighted down to ever rise again if not prompted, Elerâmâ shook her head.

The deep, craggy lines cut into the woman’s brow wended their way a little deeper; Elerâmâ kept waiting to see beads of blood bloom on her skin like sweat, but that moment never came. “I… I see.” She sighed heavily. “I am sorry, little one, but I must ask these things. Do you know who it was who did this?”

Elerâmâ shook her head.

“Do you know why it is that this happened?”

Once again, Elerâmâ shook her head. As she did so, she winced. It was not that the mystery had teeth, she was realizing. It was that the mystery had fangs, and those fangs were clamped shut around her flesh.

Another deep sigh. The woman leaned back, resting her back against the edge of the bench opposite the one Elerâmâ had lied down on, pressing a curled hand over her mouth. She was silent for a long time, long enough that Elerâmâ thought she might be done with her. But after a few moments that felt like an eternity and yet like the blink of an eye, those eyes, so bright that the brightness obliterated all color, were on Elerâmâ’s face once more. “Little one, have you any other kin we could take you to.”

Why was it that Mother had never spoken of her kin? Elerâmâ thought she had heard it said that her father’s family had been killed in one of the multitude of battles that long ago plagued the land, but her mother had always made such a mystery out of it. Mother had always made such a mystery out of everything important. She had wanted Elerâmâ to come to the answer on her own, and when the three of them had yet been together, the idea of eventually coming to the answers on her own, solving the questions and solving the mysteries, that had seemed so exciting. But now, it was a broken ring, a cycle that could never complete, two broken ends of a thing that could never be united, ever give Elerâmâ the answers she wanted, the answers she _needed_.

Elerâmâ had no answers to give; she could say neither ‘yes’ nor ‘no.’ _I am not complete, not complete, not complete_. She shook her head, ‘no.’ Even without any answers to give that would have presented anyone with satisfaction, even on top of everything, Elerâmâ remembered herself enough to know she should not send these strangers around in circles for a homestead none of them would ever be able to find.

“That makes two of us, then,” the woman mumbled, barely audibly. “Very well.” She stood in the wagon, filling the compartment with her almost blinding radiance. “I know that some of the things in that wagon must be yours, and I can imagine there are some things of your parents’ that you would not care to leave behind. We do not have room for everything in the back of that wagon, but there should be enough room for a fair amount of it. Will you come with me, so you may show me what to take?”

So long as she would not have to speak a word, Elerâmâ could find no reason not to. (She wanted to take it all, wanted to keep absolutely none of it, wanted to remember everything, wanted to forget it all. So long as Elerâmâ was incapable of sorting all of that out, she would comply. She had been given no reason not to.) Struggling to drag herself up, as if every bone in her body really had been turned to lead, Elerâmâ followed the woman out of the wagon.

-0-0-0-

A while later, Elerâmâ could not have guessed how long, exactly, since she felt neither thirst nor hunger, and the sky remained the same swirling gray, they were all in the wagon, and the wagon was moving. There was precious little room for legs in the enclosed part of the wagon, now, but the bench was long enough that Elerâmâ could completely stretch out upon it, and the woman, whose name Elerâmâ had learned was Ranya, had found an empty place upon which she could plant her feet, and had offered no complains about the state of affairs in the wagon. Elerâmâ said nothing to Ranya, and Ranya said little to Elerâmâ.

The man, Meldir, had emerged from a dense copse of trees a fair distance from the road, holding in his hands a shovel that was as deeply crusted with dark, loamy soil as were his trousers and his gloved hands. He paused, hesitant, when his eyes fell upon Elerâmâ. Ranya took his shovel from him, holding it gingerly at a remove from her clothes, and Meldir had asked Elerâmâ if she wanted to see them.

See ‘them.’ See fresh graves which housed two empty vessels, he meant. Their spirits had gone to the water, wherever the nearest water was, and what had been put into the earth was not them, just heavy, oozing lumps that aped their appearance, aped their _lives_ …

Elerâmâ got the impression that this was perhaps not the most conventional viewpoint she could have adopted. She shook her head in silence, and went ahead of these two adults back to the wagon.

There came after that another hushed, hurried conversation outside of the wagon. Since Elerâmâ had left the door slightly ajar, she could hear most of what they were saying. One thing that came up was them speculating as to whether or not she was mute.

Let them assume what they liked. If Elerâmâ ever again found within her the impulse to speak, she would disabuse them of the notion. Until then, she just could not see the point. (If they thought she was mute, perhaps they would ask her fewer questions.)

And then, just like that, the wagon was off and away, carrying Elerâmâ from the suddenly-ravaged remains of her life. Though the wagon Ranya and Meldir had come in had been heading in the opposite direction as the one Elerâmâ had been in, the wagon had been hastily turned around, heading in the direction that Elerâmâ and her parents would have been going down, if her parents were still living and their spirits were not now with the water. Ranya had slid open a panel of wood in the front of the wagon, that Elerâmâ would have _thought_ was meant to facilitate passage to and from the driver’s bench, except the panel of wood, once slide back, was not large enough to let even Elerâmâ through, let alone an adult of Ranya’s size. Once the panel was pushed open, though, Meldir said that they were going to go a different way than originally intended, and bypass the town.

If Elerâmâ could still find it in her, she supposed she would have been curious as to just where these two had come from, and where they were going. There was nothing to suggest that they were simply wanderers; Ranya in particular struck Elerâmâ as the sort of person who was tied to a single place, and not the sort of person who traveled aimlessly, forever. If they were traveling, they were traveling with a purpose, even if it was a purpose like simple sight-seeing. And at the end of their journey, they had a place to return to.

As it was, those things occurred to Elerâmâ, but she could not find it in herself to ask. Not yet. Maybe not ever.

But here was a new mystery, coupled with Ranya’s terribly bright eyes and the accent of her Sindarin speech being so different from Meldir’s, and its weight felt as a millstone around her neck. Did she not have enough to bear, already? Did her mother not leave her enough mysteries to bear as the burned-out corpses of her life?

_I will never know my mother, not in truth_.

Elerâmâ had enough mysteries that would cling to her unfinished and unresolved and unrepentant, for the rest of her days. Perhaps, one day, if her spirit went to water, she would find her mother there, and perhaps then, she would have answers. But a Kwende could not die of old age; if no ill befell her, Elerâmâ’s life would carry on and on and on to the breaking of the world, when the architect finally decided that they had had enough of their damaged creation and destroyed the game board to begin anew. She would just go on, barring no interruption, and as some of her old self began to return to her, shriveled and piecemeal, the idea of death by violence filled her stomach with cold, sickly terror. She did not want the pain. She did not want the fear, and she did not want the pain. She would go on and on, and she would carry the unresolved with her, like a thrall carried their chains behind them.

_She will be a stranger to me, her mask never removed to reveal what lies beneath._

She had no choice about any of the burdens she bore, so she let these two travelers carry her further and further away from everything she had ever known, let them sever the threads that bound her to her home, let them whisper about her all they liked. They could do with her what pleased them. Elerâmâ did not particularly care.

In the spirit of not caring, Elerâmâ put up no protest when Ranya drew her from the wagon after night fell and they stopped to rest. After spending at least several hours lying still on her back on an unyielding wooden bench cushioned only by relatively thin pillows, Elerâmâ found her body as stiff and sore as it would have been had she fallen down a fifty-foot embankment consisting entirely of rocks. The pain was yet a comfort to her, though the inconvenience of pain was again making its presence known in her memory. Her stiffness and soreness made it difficult to walk; Ranya had the lower her down out of the back of the wagon, when it came to that.

Her parents had filled the nights sleeping under the sky with cheer. Mother had told stories; Father had taught her camping songs. They had eaten the food they’d brought with them from home; on the second night, Elerâmâ had discovered a bag of candied chestnuts her father had wanted to surprise her with, and she had gleefully made her supper off of them, sopping her fingers, the better to savor every last taste.

The silence tonight was jarring only because Elerâmâ’s mind briefly betrayed her and set her ears to seeking the sounds of her parents’ voices, but just because the silence was not jarring, did not mean that it was at all pleasant. The silence of this still and quiet night had a presence all its own, and Elerâmâ could feel her throat constrict as it wrapped its hands around her neck. This was not companionable. This was not _nice_.

_Did the Doomsman steal their—_

The horses, a pair of nearly identical silver-gray mares, were grazing on the grass without making a sound. A decent distance away from the wagon, Meldir had gathered some brush and fallen branches and was striking flint in the attempt to make that brush and those branches catch fire. The almost metallic strike of flint against flint (if they were both flint; Elerâmâ did not know, and did not care enough to find out) broke through the silence like the strike of an axe against naked stone ( _was it an axe that did it? Was it a sword_?), only for the silence to rush back in all the more resoundingly in between the strikes. Meldir did not look up from his task, did not acknowledge either Elerâmâ or Ranya, did not so much as sigh as this went on and on without success.

Elerâmâ stood in this darkness on stiff legs that didn’t want to work as they should, and the silence coiled around her, feeling ever more like hands wrapped around her neck, fit to strangle. Yes, there were these small noises, flint on maybe flint, the moaning of a distant, desolate wind, but they were not meaningful sounds. They were not things that could fill the empty world, were not things that could cut through the hands wrapped around her neck. There was noise, but there was no sound. There was nothing meaningful, and without meaning, it could have no import.

Forget strangling; Elerâmâ felt as if she could have been swallowed by the silent dark. Standing in it, the darkness that had fallen over the land with the advent of night felt like a living organism, a creature that prowled the plains and the hills and devoured all light and sound and life, until there was nothing else in the world but the silent dark. Elerâmâ thought she could understand the impulse, to make the world over so that when you looked into it, you would see reflected nothing but yourself. She knew that was unfair, knew that was cruel and that it was something that the Dark Hunter or Thaurond would have done, but if you looked into something and could see reflected only yourself, you would never see anything new, or threatening. You would never see anything that could hurt you, and the world was _full_ of things that wanted to hurt you. Yes, Elerâmâ could see the appeal.

But Elerâmâ understood, even now, what the way of things was. She was not the sort of person who could ever change the world. She was young, and small, and had little power, in any sense of the word. What was more likely was that she was one of the ones who would be changed by the people who actually had the power to change the world. For good or ill, she was one of the people who would be changed. She was not one of the people who would be doing the changing.

Set your strength against the world, and it would open its mouth, and you would fall in.

She was too small, by herself, to ever change anything. One of the Balī would have crushed her underfoot without ever realizing she was there. And even if she ever gained that power, there were countless small people who would be crushed under _her_ feet as she set about changing the world to an image that would not hurt her.

So, the silent dark might swallow her. If it chose to, there was little Elerâmâ could do to stop it. The most she could do was try to comfort herself with the thought that it might choke on her bones.

A large, warm hand pressed between her shoulder blades. “Please come with me,” Ranya murmured, “and sit down,” and Elerâmâ was left reeling as that silence that had seemed so powerful and absolute was shattered into a thousand pieces, and the night was just night, once more.

Still reeling, she followed after Ranya obediently, her legs moving almost of their own accord. It was at around this time that Meldir finally had some measure of success with the flint and the brush and the branches. Sparks of red and gold burned away the darkness surrounding them, as the damp branches began to ignite, crackling and popping and smelling of wet leaves, with something earthy and rotting lingering underneath, the rancidness behind the clean smell of wood fire almost comforting in its seeming acknowledgment of all that lurked behind the gentle front the world tried to present.

Ranya nodded to her, just short of impatiently, and Elerâmâ sat down close by the infant fire, pulling her cloak close about her. The smell of the wool filled her nostrils, cloth and dye and the sachet of herbs that had been in the chest the cloak had been stored in—these things mingled into a smell that smelled of home, a smell that stuck a pin in her heart and saw Elerâmâ’s eyes stinging. The smoke, she thought. It must have been the smoke.

“You must be hungry,” Meldir said to her, in a tone of voice that she thought was meant to encouraging, though given just how wildly the corner of his mouth twitched, he might have been trying more to encourage himself. “It looks as if you were sitting there for quite some time.”

Perhaps she should have been hungry. As a Kwende, Elerâmâ could go a long time before feeling the bite of hunger taking the first exploratory nibble at her stomach, and nearly as long before thirst would start to scratch on the inner walls of her throat. Still, she had yet no idea just how long she had been sitting there with—

She had no idea just how long she had been sitting there. She had no idea just how long it had been since the last time she had eaten or drank anything. Perhaps she should have been hungry. Perhaps she should have been thirsty. Perhaps she should have been faint from the power of both sensations over her. Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps, perhaps she should have been one thing or the other, but what Elerâmâ knew was that she wasn’t feeling _anything_ strongly enough to feel either hunger or thirst.

She was not hungry. She was not thirsty.

Meldir was still trying to look encouraging, and Ranya was staring at her intently, so intently that Elerâmâ suspected the landscape of her mind might have been totally transparent and readable to this bright-eyed woman. Maybe… Maybe Elerâmâ would be able to eat something without being sick. Maybe she would be able to manage that, at least.

And Elerâmâ was beginning to grasp her situation: parents dead, and her alone with two strangers, off to parts unknown. If she was looking to survive, she’d chosen more wisely than if she had refused to be budged from that spot on the road besides her wagon, but this situation was… It wasn’t…

It would be better to accept.

Elerâmâ nodded.

Ranya walked back to the wagon, returning with a goatskin and a package wrapped in glossy paper colored a pale green and patterned with yellow leaves and flowers. “Drink some water before you try to eat anything,” she murmured. “See how it sits on your stomach.”

Elerâmâ took the goatskin from her, surprised to find that the slightly stale water felt like the sweetest juice on a mouth she’d not realized until now was as dry as one of the herbs from her mother’s garden after it had been left hanging for storage and use during the winter. Her tongue was thick and almost swollen in her mouth, ponderous and foreign like a slug that had gone a little too long without damp and cool darkness.

She drank, and drank, and drank. Once she started drinking, she couldn’t stop, and with her eyes shut, she could only faintly hear the noises of concern issuing from Meldir’s lips. Elerâmâ did not stop drinking until the skin was empty, and the body of it was crumpling under her clenched hands. The water sat in her stomach like she’d been drinking molasses, thick and heavy and slightly nauseating, but once Elerâmâ opened her eyes, once she sat more heavily against the ground, once she took in a few, deep breaths, the feeling passed, and Elerâmâ ran her tongue over the roof of her mouth, surprised at how much better her mouth felt, and even more surprised at the fact that she’d not realized how dry and parched her mouth was until she was guzzling water like she’d not drank in weeks.

It felt like a betrayal. Enjoying water felt like a betrayal. Enjoying _anything_ felt like a betrayal. If Elerâmâ could have dug the betrayal out of her heart and cast it into the fire, she did not think that would have been enough to make the feeling of enjoyment fall out of her head. She would have to learn to live with things she did not want dwelling inside of her.

“Quite a long time, then,” Meldir muttered, more to Ranya than to Elerâmâ.

“I saw a well close by,” Ranya replied evenly. “We can check the water in the morning.”

Elerâmâ could have drunk the entire contents of the well, and still felt unsated. Empty, was she? More like bottomless, and now, the wonder, the fear, was if she would ever feel full again, if there would ever be anything that could make her feel less like a sieve through which poured everything that could have nourished her.

(But did she even wish to be nourished? Did she wish to thrive? She could not say, or guess.)

Ranya took the paper-wrapped package she had been holding, and undid the paper, to reveal a square cake of what looked like dense, brown bread. “Eat as much of this as you like. Just based on the performance you gave us, I suspect you’re hungry enough to eat all of it.”

She passed the cake into Elerâmâ’s hands, and Elerâmâ paused to let the smell of it fill her nostrils full before eating it. It smelled… The aroma was not as intense as it would have been were the cake hot, but she could still pick up on it as though it was fresh out of the oven. It smelled dense and savory and salty, and Elerâmâ could feel her mouth watering even before she took the first bite. Elerâmâ bit down eagerly, only pausing for a moment to grapple with the surprise of tasting not just bread, but also heavily salted pork and a sharp-tasting herb that could have been clove. Once the first bite was down her throat, dropping into her belly, she was ravenous. The rest of the cake, she devoured so quickly that she barely tasted any of it. All that mattered was eating it, was having food in a stomach that screamed for more. Taste was a distant consideration, at best.

(She would have been easily poisoned. But that would be true for every meal she shared with these two.)

The cake was gone, all too soon. While Elerâmâ scoured the paper wrapping for crumbs, her stomach growled at her: _I am not satisfied_. But then, she could hardly have been satisfied. She was not eating a meal with her parents. She was eating some sort of meat cake she had been given after the empty shells that had once housed her parents had been buried under pounds upon pounds of cold dirt. Where could satisfaction be found, in such a situation as this one?

The taste of the cake lingered in Elerâmâ’s mouth, unable to be washed out, for she had already drunk all of the water. As it lingered, the taste of salted meat clinging to her tongue and the roof of her mouth began to change. The pleasant savor of salted pork soured and sharpened to choking copper, hot and harsh and stubbornly clinging where it had rooted itself in, resisting all attempts by a thick, sluggish tongue to wipe away.

Elerâmâ could not begin to guess how much longer her mouth would continue to taste of blood. Perhaps she would go to sleep (if she slept) with a mouth that still swam with the copper presage of death. Perhaps the reek of it would follow her into what dreams dogged her steps nowadays. Perhaps it would still be with her when she woke, her constant, silent companion. Perhaps this signifier of mortality would simply remain with her unto the breaking of the world, silent and baleful, stripping what joy she might have ever found in the world away from it.

If she could find any joy. That was very much an open question.

Ranya nodded her head slightly as she took the paper back from Elerâmâ. “A long time,” she muttered, running her fingernail over the slightly crumpled edge of the paper. “It must indeed have been a long time.”

Maybe. Maybe, it had. And maybe it would be a long time yet before Elerâmâ saw cause to eat again. Her stomach was unsatisfied, but her mind was balking at the idea of more food. Eating felt like a betrayal.

Living felt like a betrayal, too, like she had been naughty and disobeyed a rule one of her parents had set down for her. She could not help being alive. She could not help any of it.

“Do you feel ill?” Ranya was asking her. She had pressed a hand between Elerâmâ’s shoulder blades, bracing, like she expected Elerâmâ to pitch forward or backwards or to the side, or expected her to keel over right into the fire, if not supported. “You ate very quickly. You should sit still for now, and try to breathe evenly.”

Again, there was no reason not to comply. Elerâmâ had nowhere else to go, nowhere else she _could_ go. Sleep was not something she looked forward to. She saw nothing to do except sit by a fire that was slowly gaining strength, slowly overcoming the dampness that assailed its materials. She could have sat here until the breaking of the world, until she was growing moss and lichen and passers-by would have thought her an oddly-shaped rock.

Somehow, she suspected that Ranya and Meldir would not allow her such.

…They might have to drag her from this spot, come the morning.

Ranya stood in a fluttering rustle of shimmery skirts and long, trailing sleeves. Elerâmâ did not watch her, instead content to stare down at her lap, linen trousers and scuffed leather boots now spotted with mud stains, grass stains, and crumbs. Well, ‘content’ might not have been the exact word, might not have been the most accurate word, but it was something to look at. Something familiar.

“Let’s…” Meanwhile, Ranya was settling down just behind Elerâmâ, was pulling something from a pocket, something that dragged ungraciously across the fabric, and from the sheer amount of rustling to be heard, just did not want to come out. “Let’s do something about your hair.”

Elerâmâ stiffened.

Meldir said warningly, “Ranya.”

“If we wait much longer, it will have to be cut to deal with all of the tangs,” Ranya said firmly, clearly not to be budged. “On top of everything, I would not ask her to contend with _that_. When one is weighted down by grief, such an alteration is…” She faltered, and fell silent.

Meanwhile, Meldir was regarding Ranya as if he was trying to read something on her face, something that had been written very small. At length, he dipped his head and nodded. “I’ll not stop you, my dear.” He stoked the fire with a stick and snorted. “You should take care when you do it, though. I imagine her scalp is far more delicate than mine.”

“And if you had attended to your hair properly, we would not have had that issue,” Ranya retorted.

The sheer normality of the exchange hit Elerâmâ like a sack full of rocks. The world wobbled around her, colors spiraling in and out of the blackness of night and the variegated tongues of the fire, bright and dark and shifting and blurry. She took a deep breath through her nose, but that did not set the world to clear sight. She felt as if she was looking at the world through a screen of rippling water; was _this_ the way the spirits of dead Kwendî saw the world? Was this how she would see it, all the time, if ever she went to water, if she became one with the primordial fibers of the earth?

Elerâmâ… No, she did not care for that, did not care for that, at all. There was no comfort to be found in a world where you could see nothing coming clearly until it was right in front of your face. No comfort, and no safety. To be unable to see the strike of the sword until the tip was plunging into your belly, that was not a way to go about life in this world. There could be any number of threats surrounding Elerâmâ at any time, and she needed to be able to _see_ them.

_How am I to answer any of the mysteries I have been left with without clear eyes?_

The clearest, most far-seeing eyes in the world might not have been able to complete the broken ring of those questions. Elerâmâ tried to push the thought away, but it was now rooted in her mind, and would not go.

Something entered her field of vision on her right side. Elerâmâ started as her vision abruptly came back into sharp focus, and she saw a pale hand holding a comb. “If you think you can work the tangles loose on your own,” Ranya said quietly, “I will not stop you.”

Her hand shaking just a little bit, Elerâmâ took the comb. It was made of a deep red wood, streaked through with a few bands of lighter, almost pinkish red. The wood was smooth and highly-polished under Elerâmâ’s hand, and the teeth of the comb were even and sharp. Carved into the head of the comb was the image of a running horse.

Though there was nothing to suggest the age or youth of the comb. But when Elerâmâ held the comb in her hands, a thought took root in her mind: _this comb is very old._

But however old it might be, the teeth were intact and sharp, and Elerâmâ would sooner grapple with it on her own than have someone else contend with her hair.

_Mother always—_

Elerâmâ set the comb to her hair, on a section of hair above her left ear. There had always been at least some resistance when either she or her mother combed or brushed her curly hair. _Oh, hair like ours starts to tangle the moment we put our combs away,_ Mother had said, rueful smile mingled with exasperated tone. _I would not worry too much over it if I were you, but you should brush your hair out thoroughly every morning, anyways._

There had always been at least some resistance when Elerâmâ tried to comb her hair, but what she encountered now, that was something else entirely. At least before, when she encountered resistance, she was at least able to _move_ the comb. Now, no matter how she struggled, she could not shift the comb down in her hair. Her scalp began to ache as she yanked harder and harder, grappling against the legion of tangles that had made a rat’s nest out of her hair. If she could not feel it attached to her own scalp, she would not have been able to recognize it as her own hair. Her _own_ hair had never become so hopelessly tangled before.

(She was already becoming someone her parents wouldn’t have recognized. That would have inevitably happened when she underwent her next growth spurt, but she’d not expected it would happen so _soon_.)

She kept on grappling with the comb and her hair, wrestling with both hands, but then, Ranya took the comb out of her hands, gentling disentangling it from her hair. “I think I will have greater success with this than you.”

And just judging by the way she had said it, Elerâmâ did not think she would have taken ‘no’ for an answer. She could… It would be alright. _I want—_ It did not matter what she wanted. What mattered was what was going to happen, whether she liked it or not.

She wasn’t a small child to shout or cry or throw tantrums when things didn’t go her way. And there was the matter of Ranya maybe being able to return her hair to some semblance of normalcy. If she could do that, then maybe it wouldn’t be so bad.

Ranya had not waited for Elerâmâ to give assent. After hopping up from her seat behind her, she came instead to sit down on Elerâmâ’s left-hand side, making of herself a great shadow with which to snuff out the firelight. Or else a shadow who had taken all of the firelight into her own eyes. When her lips parted slightly as she looked Elerâmâ’s tangled hair over, Elerâmâ, regarding her out of the corner of her eye, half-expected to see Ranya breathing fire.

A dragon was an odd thing to make of her, considering she had shown none of the other typical traits. What Elerâmâ ought to make of Ranya, she did not know. Perhaps speculation would serve as a proper distraction from what Ranya planned to do with her hair.

Or perhaps Elerâmâ would be able to focus upon nothing but what was happening right now. That was also possible.

“Your hair seems fairly clean,” Ranya murmured. “That’s good. I think you will be able to go on washing it as you normally would. Now, I’m just going to start on this side, and work my way around. That seems the best way to avoid missing any tangles.”

And so it began. Ranya’s touch did not feel the same as her mother’s. Elerâmâ wanted her mother’s touch, wanted it so badly that she felt as if she might die from the lack of it, but had this near-stranger come to her and begun to work on her hair, she did not know how she would have stood it. She did not know how she would have lived with it if her mind had fooled her into believing that this was her mother’s touch she felt, but the illusion had then been shattered by a fleeting sight of pale flesh or gold hair or too-bright, burning eyes.

She was still waiting for the sound of her parents’ voices. Elerâmâ did not realize that until she realized she was waiting for the wall of chatter her mother used to fill the air and take her daughter’s attention away from any particularly painful knot that must be entangled. Why she was still waiting, she could not guess, and the ignorance felt like nails being driven into her flesh. Would that she could know for sure that the nails would be gone, come the morning. Would that she could know that she would wake up and not, for a single moment, forget that her parents were dead.

Mother had been firm, but gentle. Mother had always known exactly what to do, no matter the quality of the tangle she encountered. And Mother had always been able to make relatively quick work out of the tangles in Elerâmâ’s hair. Nothing had been beyond her ability to overcome.

Ranya was also reasonably gentle. She moved with a slowness that bespoke patience, and possibly also a lack of desire to send Elerâmâ away with so much as a single tangle still in her hair. But there escaped at times little noises from her mouth that sounded nothing but frustrated. Her own hair was perfectly straight, without a wave or so much as a ripple. _That_ was the hair _she_ brushed out every day, not dense, circuitous curls like Elerâmâ’s, and it was plain that Ranya had had little experience brushing or combing thick curls like Elerâmâ’s.

Elerâmâ eyed Meldir, whose hair _was_ rather thick, but rippled in gentle waves, without a hint of a true curl to be found. Then again, this might be the first time that Ranya had ever tried to make sense of curly hair.

But for all that progress was slow, Ranya was still as gentle as she was able, laboring over denser tangles with her fingers rather than trying to hack through them with the comb. This just went on and on, and the longer it went on, the longer Elerâmâ dealt with the phantom not-sensation of fingers in her hair, the longer she dealt with the occasional tingling brush of fingertips against her scalp of her ears or neck, the harder it became to breathe.

All of a sudden, Ranya was craning her neck, her long sheet of hair turned to molten gold as the firelight shone through it. Urgency nipping at her voice, she asked, “I’m not hurting you, am I?”

It was only then that Elerâmâ realized that her eyes were full. She blinked furiously until her vision was no longer blurred by water, and shook her head.

Perhaps unconvinced, perhaps merely apprehensive, Ranya’s lip dragged an awkward, crooked line, but she eventually turned her attention back to Elerâmâ’s hair. “Rána is full, tonight,” she remarked, in a tinny voice like she was trying to fill the silence with noise for her own sake. “It’s been a while since I last saw it come this close to the earth; Tilion must be seeking light other than Arien’s, this night.”

Meldir hummed agreement, but Elerâmâ found herself jerking her head away from Ranya’s hands so that she could look up at the sky herself. Her eyes widened as she did so, and she barely felt Ranya trying to coax her back into the position she had previously occupied.

Where had all of the clouds gone? The last she had checked, the sky was yet choked with clouds that could at any moment burst and dump on them enough rain to flood the land. (Part of Elerâmâ felt that that would have been cleansing. There was no part of her that particularly wanted to discover what drowning felt like. But there was part of her that thought a flood would have been cleansing, for this land which yet harbored at least one murderer within its bounds could have used a good cleansing.) She had never noticed any change in the skies, but while her back was turned, while her attention was firmly locked elsewhere (nowhere), the sky had chosen to change.

Where the clouds had gone, Elerâmâ could not begin to guess. They could have gone north or east or west or south, the better to trouble some other newly-orphaned child, or they could have scattered in all directions, or they could have just dissolved. Whatever had become of them, the clouds had vanished, leaving behind a night sky totally unobscured.

As Ranya said (even if the pronunciation had been a little strange), Ranā was no longer hidden from the world by a veil of clouds. The whole of his face was unshadowed, and he shone down on the world as a luminous silver disc, the little spots that pocked his face shimmering around their edges. Ranā shone down on the world, bathing the darkened places and hills and forests in a milky luster.

But Elerâmâ was a Kwende, and she was a Kwende of a kind who had known only the stars, and who yet regarded Ranā and Anār as recent, almost dubious inventions. Elerâmâ was a Kwende who had been taught to love the stars above all others in the sky.

So she looked to the stars.

And, oh, Elerâmâ found them.

This was the thing that stuck with her, this was the thing that really felt like a slap in the face. The stars shone in that inky sky and they shone as beautifully as they ever had. They sparkled and glistened white and gold and scarlet and azure. Irresistibly, Elerâmâ recalled the story of Barádā and the old stars she cast down out of the sky. Every single star that shone down on her now could well have been those new stars, those stars made from jewels and silver and gold, those stars that shone with the light of the waters of the trees of life.

She had said—

What had become of those old stars?

_Mother said—_

They had vanished out of history, disappearing from a world that had no further use for them. That was the only interpretation Elerâmâ could make of the story. What life could a star forge, when the only thing it had ever been made to be was a star, and its maker had decided it was no longer fit to be a _star_? What life could a Kwende live, when they had been made to be their parents’ child, and their parents were gone?

_Mother said—_

Mother hadn’t said a _word_.

Mother had never given her any answers. She’d expected her to find the answers on her own, and that had been fine when she was still alive, but she was _dead_ , she’d gone to water, and the dead could give no answers, the dead could not tell you if you were right or wrong, the dead could not hold you or comfort you, or…

Or…

Or.

Her eyes were burning. Her eyes were swimming. Her eyes were overflowing, and her lungs were screaming.

Not, that wasn’t her lungs. That was her.

That was her, though Elerâmâ did not recognize the noises that were coming out of her mouth. She did not recognize her mouth, did not recognize her body. All of it felt like it belonged to someone else, felt like it belonged to a stranger, like she’d stolen it from them and left everything that should have been hers behind her on a muddy road, except everything that was hers was dead and buried, and this stolen body and stolen mouth and stolen life would soon supplant everything that had ever been hers, so why not howl? Why not scream so loudly that every living thing in the land could hear her?

Why not scream so loudly that even the dead might hear her? If the dead heard her, maybe they might come.

The dead might come, but in the meantime, the living moved to enact measures of their own. Ranya had thrown down her comb and set her hands on Elerâmâ’s shoulders, pulling her up with a strength Elerâmâ would never have guessed that Ranya possessed, turning Elerâmâ round so that she faced Ranya and then towing her forward, pressing her head close against Ranya’s shoulder, face mashed against the soft, slippery fabric of her robe. Meldir had gotten up as well, his shadow shuddering and pitching away from the fire as he rounded the campfire to come crouch down beside them, wrapping his arms around Ranya’s shoulders so that Elerâmâ was enveloped between the two of them, completely cut off from both the light of the fire and the dark of the night.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Ranya kept saying, over and over again, her voice oddly muffled, but then, over the screaming, anything was going to sound muffled—the more surprising thing was that her voice was audible at all. “I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry.”

Elerâmâ didn’t respond. Screaming was the only thing that felt right, so screaming was all she cared to do. She screamed again and again and again, voice warbling and wobbling, pitching back and forth between a volume loud enough that she would later be surprised she had not shattered her own hearing, and something that was so close to the normal volume of her voice that the noises that wrenched from her mouth barely qualified as a scream at all. Her arms hung limply at her side, but she pressed her head hard against Ranya’s shoulder, wetting her clothes with her tears and mucus. She shook as she screamed, body shaking as violently as a birch tree wracked by a summer thunderstorm, the winds screaming out of the east, shaking the land down to the foundations of the earth and cutting deep swathes through the forest, leaving a trail of broken trees in its wake.

If she was to be a thunderstorm, maybe the destruction would leave her feeling exhausted enough to confuse that with peace. Elerâmâ did not think so, though. Her exhaustion would not return her parents to her.

And so, she screamed on, and on, while these two near-strangers held her and the fire began to gutter low.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Barádā** —Varda (Primitive Quendian)  
>  **Thaurond** —Sauron (Primitive Quendian)
> 
> **Anār** —a Primitive Quendian name for the Sun, derived from the root ‘anár-.’  
>  **Balī** —the Valar (singular: Bálā) (Primitive Quendian); derived from the root ‘BAL-‘, meaning ‘power’  
>  **Kwende** —the Primitive Quendian name for an Elf, later adapted as the Quenya ‘Quendë’ (plural: Kwendî)  
>  **Kwendî** —the Primitive Quendian name for the Elves, later adapted as the Quenya ‘Quendi’ (singular: Kwende)  
>  **Ranā** —a Primitive Quendian name for the Moon, derived from the root ‘ran-‘ meaning ‘wander, stray.’  
>  **Rána** —a name given to the Moon by the Ñoldorin Exiles, signifying ‘The Wanderer’ (Exilic Quenya); of the Sun and the Moon, it is the elder of the two vessels, lit by Telperion’s last flower; in an early version of ‘Of the Sun and Moon and the Hiding of Valinor’ was said to be “the giver of visions” ( _The Lost Road_ 264).


	6. Chapter Six

There were many consequences of that screaming fit. One of them was that Elerâmâ went to sleep soon after the three of them broke apart and Ranya had decided that it would be useless to try to comb out Elerâmâ’s hair properly that night. Elerâmâ slept more, _far_ more deeply than she had ever thought she would, though a consequence of _that_ was that she was chased by formless, hungry dreams all the time that she slept, and she awoke to find herself stiffer and sorer by far than she had been when she had left the wagon the previous evening. When Elerâmâ awoke, to a pale morning and a fire burned down completely, black ash and soot and charred sticks mixed together like a vile parody of a meal, she was so stiff that she could barely move. Every muscle in her body ached like she had spent the entire night running, without end.

There came no moment where she tricked herself into believing her parents were still alive. Whether or not that was a consequence of anything, Elerâmâ did not know. It was perhaps something she was better off not contemplating.

Another consequence was that they were delayed in setting off that morning, as Ranya insisted on brushing out Elerâmâ’s hair properly before they left, in the morning sunlight that shone down on them. By the time she was done, Anār had climbed halfway up the eastern sky, and Meldir had made several trips back and forth between the nearby well, gathering fresh water for them on the journey—“Who knows when next we’ll find something like this?” he had said by way of explanation, when Ranya’s brows started to climb towards her hairline at the amount of water he was collecting. Ranya wound up using some of that water to wet the comb, the better to try to expedite the process of teasing the tangles loose. The water was shockingly, unpleasantly cold against Elerâmâ’s skin, and she was shivering profoundly by the time Ranya had gotten through the last tangle. (Her scalp was also almost unbearably tender. That did not help, not one bit.)

The other, most lasting consequence of the screaming fit was that there was no longer any pretending to either Meldir or _especially_ Ranya that Elerâmâ was mute. All Elerâmâ had to do was cast one passing glance at Ranya’s face, without even meeting eyes that seemed no less terribly bright for the fact that it was a morning in which there was plenty of sunlight that could, in theory, have diffused their light, to tell that Ranya would not have believed it for even a moment longer had Elerâmâ still kept her mouth shut, and only nodded ‘yes’ or ‘no’ in response to questions.

“What is your name?” Ranya asked her as they were climbing into the back of the wagon. There was no unkindness to her voice, no sharpness to her tone, but at the same time, Elerâmâ had only to listen to her speak to know that there would be no brooking the request. The request was not a request at all.

Through the open panel of wood, Meldir chimed in, “Yes, we have no idea what to call you. We can’t just keep on going ‘Hey, you!’ all this time.”

Ranya smiled darkly. “I once knew a man who certainly thought _he_ could,” she muttered. She shook her head and straightened up, the faint sunlight that filtered through the lattices and the curtains catching on the crown of her head. “But he met a bad end, and we are not him. It would indeed be discourteous not to call you by your name. Please, little one, what is it we are to call you?”

Elerâmâ had to try to make the word come out of her mouth; her voice would not work on the first try, only on the second. “Elerâmâ,” she nearly croaked, wincing at the altered quality of her voice. Logically, she knew that the amount of screaming she had done the night before would make its mark upon her voice, but she’d _not_ thought that her voice would come out sounding as if she had been spending the entirety of the last week coughing and sneezing. She’d not thought she would come out sounding as if the inside of her throat had been rubbed up and down with sandpaper. She’d not thought her throat would hurt this much when she tried to talk.

To that, Ranya handed her a freshly-filled goatskin of water. “Drink it slowly, this time,” she advised. “I think that will serve you better. So…” She shifted forward a little, so that her face was illuminated by one of the pale shafts of sunlight that snuck in past Meldir’s back, through the gap made by the slide-back panel of wood. “Eleráma?”

Once again, the pronunciation was a little… was a little strange, made only stranger by Ranya’s lilting accent. Elerâmâ grimaced, and repeated, “Ele _râmâ_.”

“We can call you that when it’s the three of us,” Meldir cut in suddenly. There was an odd hitch in his voice, as if there was a splinter in his throat. “But once we return home, there may be something else you prefer to be called when out in public.”

“There’s nothing wrong with my name!” Elerâmâ protested, wincing when the effort to raise her voice ended with her voice cracking.

Ranya, meanwhile, was frowning at the back of Meldir’s head. “Indeed, there is nothing wrong with her name. In fact, it makes the linguistic leap quite smoothly—and besides, there’s no petty…” Her nostrils flared, and she drew a deep breath, before going on, in a very calm, very deliberate voice, “In these days, there are no people with any influence over us who think it their right to dictate to us how we spell and pronounce our names. So why _not_ ‘Eleráma?’”

Meldir looked back over his shoulder, fixing Ranya in an adamantine stare. “I just think it might be better for her to go by a different name to new neighbors. After all, epithets are so common; we all have at least one by the time we’re grown, even if it’s only a silly little nickname given to us by our childhood friends. And I wonder how well it would go for her, if our neighbors could tell just where she came from, just by hearing her name, as she pronounces it.”

Elerâmâ did not like the sound of that at _all_. What sort of place did these two live in, that her name, as said by her own lips, would alienate her from all of her neighbors?

(As Elerâmâ would learn as an adult woman, to her frustration and her grief, her name, as said by her own lips, was enough to make her an outsider most places she went. But that was yet far off, and was not yet a burden that would be thrown on top of the pile of burdens she already had to bear.)

Ranya and Meldir made what could only be described as fiery eye contact for several moments longer, before Ranya dropped her gaze and sighed. “I… suppose you have a point.” Though it certainly did not sound as if she cared for that point. Ranya turned her attention to Elerâmâ, a brittle smile fixed to her face by a sliver of sunlight. “I leave that to you; it seems only right. I would advise you choose something in Sindarin,” she added, her voice curdling with such intense bitterness that for a moment, the very air tasted acrid. “That is the language we typically turn to, when we must choose a new name.”

Elerâmâ had no intention of turning to _any_ other language. This was the name her parents had given her, and the idea of _abandoning_ it, for any length of time, for any _reason_ , felt like the greatest betrayal she could have committed. Greater even than living when they had died, the abandonment of the name her parents had given her was to reject everything they had ever been to her. It was to become someone and something else, to don a mask that would become fixed to her skin and thus become her new face, a home built on no foundation but whispers and stardust—a home doomed to collapse.

_What if it’s just pretend?_

Elerâmâ could practically _see_ her mother sitting at her side, translucent in the faint light, whispering in her ear about games and secrets and how, oh, how she could make a mystery of herself, something that could only be unlocked by those who loved her and cared to truly endeavor to uncover the truth about her. _I can never be hurt by the discovery of the truth_ , Elerâmâ reasoned, in a voice that tried to sound like her mother’s, and succeeded only in sounding like a weird amalgamation of her voice and her mother’s, _if I craft a mystery that can only be solved by those who already care enough about me that they would never wish to hurt me_.

The thought, once it had settled in her mind, felt—strange. It seemed as natural as if it had always been there, and that, in and of itself, was strange. Because Elerâmâ _knew_ it had not always been there, _knew_ she had never thought of her life in such terms before just now. But her life had been full of mysteries already, had it not? Her mother had always made such a mystery out of everything that truly mattered, had she not? Elerâmâ might not know the answers to those mysteries, might be barely able to guess even at the shape of the mystery, but from her mother, she had some idea of how a mystery was to be constructed.

From her mother, Elerâmâ had some idea of how she might reinvent herself, and conceal herself.

Teeth gritted, Elerâmâ nodded. “I… I would like some time.”

“I can imagine,” Ranya mumbled.

“That’s perfectly fine,” Meldir chirped, an incongruous bastion of good cheer. “We don’t choose names lightly, do we?”

No, they did not, and Elerâmâ would need all the time she could find to stitch together a name that would service the mystery. (She would need even more time than that to convince herself that this was not the betrayal her heart kept telling her that it was.)

“It will be some weeks before we return to our home,” Ranya went on. “That should be enough time, I think.” She leaned in close to Elerâmâ, gold hair spilling over her shoulders like a waterfall dammed by the boulder of her head. “And I understand,” she whispered—a conspiratorial whisper, something Elerâmâ would have thought too mundane for such a fantastical-looking woman, “if you wish to go by your original name in our home. I have known few people who were happy to be made to give up any name their parents gave them.”

For the first time since the gray and the mud and the sight of empty shells that had once been people, Elerâmâ felt curiosity strong enough to resolve itself into a question. “Where are we going?”

“Lórinand,” they replied as one.

Elerâmâ had never heard of it, though some of her mother’s tales had involved a place with a similar name: ‘Lindórinand.’ If she could find it in herself, she might ask more questions about it, later. But for now, what she felt was that no matter what it was like, it would have been unequal to the home she had left behind her. If Ranya and Meldir had spent the whole journey weaving tales of Lórinand’s splendor and wonders, Elerâmâ knew that that would have only made the disappointment more acute. She would not ask.

-0-0-0-

So began what was to be a long, quiet, frankly dreary journey, as far as Elerâmâ was concerned. Where Elerâmâ’s parents had been happy to let her walk alongside the wagon, Ranya and Meldir would not allow it for any reason, nor any length of time. This wagon moved more quickly, and Elerâmâ would have been hard-pressed to keep up with it. On top of that, the two of them, Meldir especially, were nervous of bandits, and feared that Elerâmâ would have presented entirely too enticing a target.

Perhaps that was prudent. Perhaps not. Perhaps it was further fuel for Elerâmâ’s nightmares, or perhaps the faceless, noiseless apparitions that jolted her awake from sleep were related to something else entirely. There was plenty to choose from, when it came to the fodder that was constantly being stuffed into her nightmares.

Elerâmâ was not allowed to walk alongside the wagon, but Ranya put up no protest when Elerâmâ pushed back the curtain from the nearest window, and set herself to staring through the triangular lattice. The landscape changed slowly, going from smooth, almost perfectly flat plains to hilly land once more, though the hills were gentler, more rolling and less steep, than the hills Elerâmâ had come from. The hills Elerâmâ might never see again.

That thought soured her thoroughly on the idea of staring out of the window.

_Shouldn’t I still be watching, though?_ Her mother’s advice returned to her, driving into her flesh like a nail. _Shouldn’t I be trying to remember?_

But Elerâmâ did not want to remember. She could be a storyteller-in-training, some other day. She could be herself, some other day.

Or perhaps she should not be herself. Perhaps, for the sake of the mystery, she should be someone completely different, and for that purpose, give up storytelling. Maybe give up stories, altogether.

But the moment that thought crossed Elerâmâ’s mind, she rejected it. Foolish it might have been, foolish it probably was, but she could not bring herself to shed even that part of herself. Once upon a time, she’d regarded some (many, if she was being quite honest) of the aspects of learning how to tell a story tedious, found it dull and boring, but now, it was the most she had of her mother. It was to be what legacy her mother would leave to the world, and for Elerâmâ to just abandon it…

No. That was not to be borne.

On top of that, a skill for telling stories would no doubt be helpful in fostering the mystery she planned to make out of herself. Her mother had made a complete and total mystery of herself, and Elerâmâ had never known a better storyteller than her.

Later. She would exert herself later. When she felt more like herself, she would return to drinking in the landscape. So long as Elerâmâ held onto herself at the core, she could weave all the mysteries she liked.

Now, if only she could sort out the mystery sitting across from her.

Meldir, Elerâmâ did not sense any special mystery from. There was a difference between a person you did not know much about, and a person who was mysterious. A person you did not know much about was just a person. There was no special shine to them—or maybe it was a special haze? Elerâmâ could not rightfully say which. Maybe it was neither.

It would be easier to say what a person who was mysterious was like. They burst their edges, or if they did not burst over those edges, they were visibly straining. You could look at them and see, just _see_ , that there was far more going on beneath the skin than you would ever think could be going on beneath someone’s skin. A line that came to mind, though Elerâmâ could not recall just where she had heard it, was “I contain multitudes.” She’d probably heard it from her mother. Most things like that, Elerâmâ had heard from her mother.

(It made Elerâmâ think of what it would be like if a body was forced to bear more than one spirit within. She thought of that. Eventually, she managed to stop. Hopefully, it wouldn’t bob back up to the surface when once again she must sleep.)

A person who was mysterious was a person who just _exuded_ secrecy, whether they wanted to or not, whether they even realized it, or not. Someone who had secrets could never fully conceal it from others. That Mother had secrets, and large ones as well, that was becoming increasingly obvious to Elerâmâ by the time she had… by the time she had died. A Kwende could not completely hide from another Kwende that they had secrets; there was a shadow in the light of their eyes that would always be visible, no matter what they tried to do. It had taken Elerâmâ a little while to notice the shadow in the burning, terrible, _impossible_ light of Ranya’s eyes, but it was there. It was hard for her to see, both because of the brilliant light and because Elerâmâ could not bear to look into Elerâmâ’s eyes for very long, but there was a little sliver of darkness within the light, something behind which hid a lifetime of experiences that Ranya was not willing to advertise, something she did not make obvious to nearly anyone around her. Meldir might know, but to everyone else, Elerâmâ had little doubt that Ranya kept her mouth firmly shut.

Why, Elerâmâ could not say. That was the thing with mysteries, was it not? Someone could be making a mystery of themselves, keeping a secret of everything about themselves, and they could be doing it for any possible reason in the whole, entire world. They could be doing it because they were fleeing a criminal past, or because there was grief in their past that they just could not face, or because there was something about themselves that, through no fault of their own, would put them in danger if it was known. It could be any of those, or it could be a combination of them, or it could be something completely different. There were in this world as many reasons for keeping a secret as there were stories.

But when Elerâmâ looked at Ranya, she could see that Ranya was not what Ranya had presented herself as. Truthfully, that would not be difficult, for Ranya had not particularly presented herself to Elerâmâ as _anything_. She’d spoken little of herself, little that Elerâmâ could call substantive. It was just that, when Elerâmâ looked at Ranya, she could see the contents spilling over the edges, could see that there was so, _so_ much more under her skin than what it seemed like her flesh should be able to fit.

There was a story there. There were maybe many stories there. Elerâmâ didn’t know what they were. But if she was to have to live in this world, truly be a _part_ of this world, after her parents had been removed from it and sent to water instead, then here was something she thought she could tackle. She was to share a wagon with this woman for several weeks, at least. While she was doing that, she could cut her teeth on the world again by learning more about Ranya.

Now, if only Elerâmâ could both find the energy to do so, and find something that felt like a thread she could pull at, and find a way to do it that wouldn’t have risked incurring the woman’s wrath. It would be an even more unpleasant several weeks than it was already shaping up to be, cooped up inside of the wagon all day, if she managed to anger her companions so thoroughly that neither of them would be willing to say a word to her.

(And it did not escape her that they could have just left her on the side of the road, if they so chose. With or without any of the supplies she would need to survive without a roof over her head. Elerâmâ had seen no Kwendî settlements since leaving home, and at this point, she was unwilling to put her trust in Men. She would have to be delicate. She just didn’t know how she was _supposed_ to be delicate.)

Those thoughts swirling through her mind, Elerâmâ curled up on her side on the bench, trying to find a position that would not see pain blooming in her back or her shoulders or her head, and stared at Ranya’s knees. Not for any special reason—that was just what was on eye level, at present, and it was thoroughly clear of any chance of having to look at Ranya’s eyes.

Elerâmâ stared at Ranya’s knees, clad in green today, and tried not to think of her parents.

She found herself trying not to think of her parents quite a lot, as the day wore on.

-0-0-0-

It was the second day, and things were worse than Elerâmâ had anticipated they would be. Her nightmares were _just_ as vivid as she had thought they would be, full of blood and gore and screaming and faceless, soundless apparitions, things that stabbed and squeezed and strangled and shook Elerâmâ’s shoulders and demanded things of her that she could never, in her whole life, fulfill. They had plagued her sleep the entire night, setting her to wake on multiple occasions, and on two of those occasions, Meldir and Ranya had also awoken, and though they vowed they had no hard feelings, they were both noticeably peaked as the three of them hauled themselves back into the wagon come the morning. Her nightmares were just as vivid as she had expected them to be—more so, really, since every time she’d woken in the night, she had awoken _smelling_ blood, though there was no blood to be found outside its proper place—and that was part of it. It was a large part of it. But it was not all.

The other part of it, smaller only because it was merely frustrating and not actually distressing (objectively speaking, it might have been a greater issue, but Elerâmâ wasn’t out to think objectively), was that having to sit in the wagon all day, with no opportunity to go outside and walk, was proving even more trying on the second day than it had been on the first. At least on the first, things had been relatively new, and she could spend some time drinking in her surroundings, so that she at least had _something_ to do.

On the second, there was nothing. Elerâmâ had only one of her toys with her; those items had been among those that had been left in her parents’ abandoned wagon, on the grounds that they could take only what was essential, and Elerâmâ making an impulsive decision that she would sooner have some of her parents’ belongings with her than her own toys. So she had no board games she could pretend to play with another person, didn’t have her spinning top (though admittedly, there wasn’t a whole lot of room in the wagon to spin a top, and the spinning top wouldn’t have been able to distract her for very long), and she’d even neglected to bring along her flute. Oh, certainly, Elerâmâ had never had very many lessons in how to play the flute, and she would have been more likely to fill the wagon with screeching dissonance than with music that could actually have passed the time in pleasant tunes, but it would have been _something_.

What Elerâmâ had brought with her, alone among her toys, was a doll with a face of painted, glossy wood and a body of rags stuffed inside a suit of cloth. Its hair was long black horsehair tied back in a braid, and it wore a blue dress with yellow embroidery and brown boots. The paint on its face was beginning to fade a little; Father had once told her that she’d been found trying to use the doll’s face as a teething block more than once as a baby. When Elerâmâ looked down into the face of the doll, she saw…

She was trying not to see her mother’s face in this doll. There was, after all, no reason why she should, since it was a _doll_ , and a doll whose very basic features did not bear any resemblance to her mother’s, beyond them both having black hair. Elerâmâ was trying not to see any resemblance to her mother in the face of this doll, and her mind kept trying to find shared features, anyways.

The end result of this was that Elerâmâ had hidden the doll beneath a cushion, and had nothing to do with her time except lie on her side or on her back on the bench, or else try to work herself up to staring out of the window.

And yes, it was completely interminable.

She found herself longing for her mother’s stories, for her father’s traveling songs. Meldir and Ranya mostly kept to themselves, occasionally murmuring something to each other, but when it came to Elerâmâ, it felt as if they were deliberately avoiding talking to her, as if they feared that saying the wrong thing would make her shatter, like taking a hammer to glass.

No, it wasn’t ‘as if.’ That was exactly what they were doing. They were tip-toeing around her, which was quite a trick, considering that none of them were getting up and walking during the day. Elerâmâ chafed. She could do nothing else. She did not want to talk about her parents, did not want to be asked to pour out her grief to people who had never known her or her parents in happier times, did not want to look at them and see them looking back at her like they understood exactly what was going on in her mind and her heart, like everything that screamed inside of her was utterly known to them, like none of it was a surprise. Elerâmâ did not believe that grief could ever look completely the same when inside of two different people. Something about it was always going to be different. Something about it was always going to be completely unique to the person who was grieving, and completely unknown and indecipherable to everyone else.

But neither did Elerâmâ want to be treated like glass. She did not want to be treated as though she was as easily broken as all that. It did not blunt the edges of her grief, only sharpened them until they were as keen as the point of any dagger any warrior had ever carried into battle. Things were not normal, things might never be normal again, but Elerâmâ did not want to be treated as though she, in her grief, was abnormal, as though she was something like a rare animal that was only rarely encountered in the course of daily life, but when encountered, must be gently handled.

Elerâmâ was not glass. She was not a rare, delicate animal. She did not know what she would have preferred, but she knew that whatever she preferred, it was not this.

If this was to be her life, not know what she preferred but knowing that whatever it was, it was not what she was experiencing now, Elerâmâ thought her long, potentially endless life was going to be _very_ long, indeed.

There must be something else she could do. In the wagon, on the way to Lórinand, at least.

Elerâmâ was without any real distraction or occupation while within the wagon, but Ranya had not joined her among the ranks of the bored and the directionless. When the morning came, she had set upon her lap a long, thin block of wood, and on top of that a sheet of parchment-paper, and was drawing upon it with a finely-pointed graphite stick. From Elerâmâ’s position lying on her side on the bench, and Ranya’s bracing one knee higher than the other to give her an angle she was (apparently) comfortable with, Elerâmâ could not see exactly what she was drawing, but it was plainly evident that she wasn’t _writing_. Writing would have involved much a much more even track for the graphite stick, and much more even movements for Ranya’s hand.

Now, Elerâmâ was learning something about Ranya, really learning something. Ranya drew. But that something she knew only deepened the mystery. She knew that Ranya drew, but she could not tell what Ranya was drawing. She did not know for what purpose Ranya drew. She did not know if Ranya drew often, and yesterday had been an anomaly brought on by a sudden and terrible anomaly in Ranya’s life, the introduction of a new person by means of violence inflicted on other people. She did not know if Ranya just drew once in a while, when she was bored and had nothing else to do. For all Elerâmâ knew, this could be the very first time Ranya had ever drawn anything, and she was only drawing now because her lack of other diversions had driven her to an extremity. Maybe she _hated_ drawing, and would never have picked up the graphite stick and the parchment-paper had she not been stuck in this wagon all day.

The different scenarios spun round and round in Elerâmâ’s mind, always spinning, never touching. Elerâmâ couldn’t quite find the words to ask outright, but she settled on another solution. Specifically, she stared intently at the block of wood, the sheet of parchment-paper, the graphite stick, and the long, pale hand that held it, until Ranya must inevitably realize that she was being stared at and, specifically, what part of her was being stared at.

It was inevitable.

And in the spirit of that inevitability, Ranya did eventually look up, the burning glance of her bright eyes for once being something other than unwelcome, even if it was still rather… intense.

“Yes?”

Now, that was not quite what Elerâmâ had expected. She had been expecting… Okay, she had been hoping. She had been hoping that when Ranya noticed her staring at her hands holding the graphite stick, holding the parchment-paper, holding the wooden block, she would automatically realize exactly why Elerâmâ had been staring, and that she would… Yes, she had been hoping that Ranya would invite her to draw as well.

But Elerâmâ had assured herself over and over again that neither Ranya nor Meldir would ever know exactly what was in her heart or in her mind. If that applied to grief, surely it applied to more mundane matters as well. That was how these things _worked_. And if Ranya tried to take a more direct look into her mind, trying to scour it for information, Elerâmâ was sure that she would have felt such an intrusion.

(In the same breath, she wondered if she would have been able to keep Ranya out. Nothing about her bespoke power, not specifically, but her eyes must signify something, and Elerâmâ would not be surprised if the thing the impossibly bright light in her eyes signified was power. If the light was supposed to signify power, then Ranya’s eyes being so much brighter than those of any other Kwende Elerâmâ had ever known might signify that she had greater powers of mind than any Kwende Elerâmâ had known. She had never faced such a test; her parents had never gone rooting around in her mind for information that they could have just gotten by asking her. She had no idea if she would be able to repel an invasion, if it came from such a one as Ranya.

In the next breath, Elerâmâ decided that she would just be better off not thinking about it. There was nothing she could do about it, nothing she could do to forestall it, probably nothing she could do to stop it if it came, and thus, there was no use thinking about it.

There was no use thinking about a lot of things.)

The simplest question was probably the correct thing. “What are you drawing?”

To that, a surprised, but obviously pleased smile unfurled over Ranya’s lips. Quickly suppressed it was, but still, Elerâmâ knew she had seen it, knew it had been there, and even if Ranya wanted to hide the smile, Elerâmâ wasn’t going to forget that it had been there. There was something oddly encouraging about that smile. The sight of a smile so quickly suppressed, as if Ranya was afraid to appear over-eager regarding her drawing, was something that just drew Elerâmâ in a little closer. With a smile like that, Elerâmâ could at least safely assume that Ranya did not hate drawing. That would make this more pleasant. (Maybe there would be no unpleasantness to it at all.)

“Come sit by me, and I will show you.” Ranya scooted to the side, a little closer to the opening in the wood panels, and patted the cushion she had left empty. A little cloud of dust rose up from the cushion, the motes twinkling like stars in the shafts of light pouring in from the opening in the panels of wood.

Carefully picking her way around the bags and chests on the floor, Elerâmâ did so, tucking her legs under her so that she would have a little more leverage and be able to see a little higher. Ranya being so much taller than her, she might have to bend double to demonstrate things for her properly, if Elerâmâ did not make at least some effort to meet her halfway.

“This is what I am drawing, Eleráma,” Ranya murmured, and Elerâmâ told herself to ignore the strange mispronunciation of her name. “Do you want to guess what it is?”

Ranya positioned the sheet of parchment-paper on the block of wood so that Elerâmâ could see it more clearly, and Elerâmâ peered over her arm to get a closer look at it. As she looked the paper over, she frowned, her eyebrows pinching in the furrow of her brow.

The shape Ranya had drawn was strange to her eyes. It looked… When Elerâmâ looked at it very hard, she thought it looked a bit like a woman, but the resemblance to a woman only extended so far as the general shape of her body. Beyond that, she just looked… She just looked _strange_.

She appeared to be dancing, from the way her arms were extended from her body and one of her legs was thrown up high in the air. The image certainly had the impression of movement—frenzied movement, even—and when Elerâmâ looked at the image, even though it was sketched with a graphite stick and bore absolutely _no_ color, she had to remind herself, more than once, that the drawing was not actually moving and that the drawing was just a drawing, not an image impregnated with magic, not something that could jump up and dance away from the paper it had been born on.

The sort-of woman was dancing, dancing, dancing, and the more Elerâmâ looked at her, the less she looked like a woman. Even the general shape of her body looked less like the shape of a Kwende’s body or a daughter of Men’s body, the more Elerâmâ looked at it. Her arms and legs were too long, and though she had a great amount of hair, fanning out around her, she thought she could see some strange appendages _behind_ the hair, appendages that did not look like any Kwende arms or legs Elerâmâ had ever seen, and the woman, if she was a woman, should have only had two arms and two legs _anyways_.

The woman was clad in what looked like some sort of animal hide—probably deer, based on something else about her appearance that Elerâmâ would notice later. She was holding in her left hand—the left hand that actually looked like the hand of a Kwende—a whip from which was attached many bells that Elerâmâ, for a moment, could actually _hear_ ringing, though after taking a moment to shake her head, the sound of ringing bells was out of Elerâmâ’s ears. But it was the woman’s head that was the most outlandish thing about the drawing.

Over the woman’s head, there was a deer’s skull drawn down over her face like a mask. From the skull there sprung massive antlers, extending so far that the furthest prong brushed the top of the sheet of parchment-paper. The prongs had been drawn to have very fine, very _sharp_ points, and of the woman’s face, only her lips were visible, and they were dark and smeared.

Elerâmâ stared at the image set down on paper before her, increasingly unsettled as she tried to make it into anything she might be familiar with, and failed. It just… No matter how she looked at it, she could not make it make sense, and honestly, she thought staring at it was starting to give her a bit of a headache.

“What…” She’d just have to risk it. “What is it?”

When Elerâmâ thought about it, she thought that this image could have been the rendering of some sort of monster. _That_ would have made sense; it _certainly_ would have made sense of the creature’s bizarre appearance, something that would never have been seen on any Kwende or child of Men. The Kwendî lived long lives and it was not at all unusual to encounter one who had been on this earth for thousands of years. Ranya gathered mystery around her like a cloak; it was hardly outside the realm of possibility that she had been on this earth for many thousands of years, and that in those thousands of years, she might have encountered monsters Mother had never told Elerâmâ about. Mother, indeed, had lived on this earth for unknown years, but no matter how many years it had been, Elerâmâ rather doubted it had been enough to enable Mother to travel everywhere in the world, and see everything the world had to see. Besides the fact that the Uttermost West was completely shut to her except at express times when the Balī declared themselves willing to let Kwendî sail west, there just wasn’t enough _time_ , not enough to go all over the world and learn everything there was to know.

To learn everything about the world that there was to know, Elerâmâ thought she would have needed the time of the world’s conception to its breaking at least twice over. She’d experienced little of the world, but even she understood this much: the world had entirely _too much in it_ for anyone to ever know it in its entirety. She’d learned new things every day when she was at home, and she’d stomped through those forests for as long as her parents had allowed her to go out of sight of the house by herself, well-nigh thirty years. The forest had always had one more mystery to yield up to her, a mystery that always appeared just as Elerâmâ thought she’d uncovered them all. The idea of ever uncovering every secret the world hid away from the surface, every secret it had no desire to yield up, that was just madness.

Elerâmâ was willing to entertain the idea that this creature was some sort of monster that her mother had either never told her about in any of her stories, or never encountered or heard anything about. Elerâmâ just wished that she could have had her mother here with her, so that they could speculate on the identity of the creature together. She thought her mother would have had a good time with that.

“You can’t tell what it’s supposed to be, can you?” That smile Elerâmâ had seen earlier on Ranya’s lips was _not_ there, not in full. However, the shadow of it was there, tugging at the right-hand corner of her pink lips, trying to resolve itself into a smirk.

“No, I can’t,” Elerâmâ told her frankly. Once again, honesty felt like the best way to go.

The promised smirk did indeed materialize, and though the overpower light of Ranya’s eyes made discerning expressions held in her eyes at best difficult, Elerâmâ thought she could see a hint of something wry held there. “Don’t fret. That is often the reaction of those who have never seen them for themselves. Few who have not had the pleasure imagine that they could look like this.”

So, not a monster, it would seem, though Ranya had given Elerâmâ no further clarification on just what the figure could be. At this juncture, Elerâmâ was silent, for she could think of nothing to say that she was certain would not have given offense—especially not now, when it was plain that Ranya took at least some pride in her drawing.

Ranya, at least, could now guess what Elerâmâ’s silence meant. “This,” she proclaimed, her voice oddly sonorous, “is Nessa, one of the Queens of the Valar.”

Elerâmâ felt her skin start to pebble with goosebumps, in spite of the balmy warmth pouring into the wagon. “The… Valar?” The name was unfamiliar to her, but something about it was trying to tug on memory, like a hook dragging a fish out of the water.

“Does ‘the Belain’ sound more familiar to you?” Meldir called from his place on the driver’s bench. “Pass me the drawing, Ranya; I’d like a look at it, too.”

“Oh, you mean the _Balī_ ,” Elerâmâ nearly exclaimed, everything falling into place at once.

At the same time that Ranya was mouthing ‘Balī,’ brow furrowed and mouth moving like she wasn’t entirely certain that the word would fit there, Meldir was getting a good look at the picture Ranya had drawn of Nessa of the Balī. For a long moment, the only noise that could be heard from up front was the clopping of horses’ hooves, but then, there was a strangled noise like a cat being throttled, except no, that was just Meldir.

“I don’t know why you always insist on drawing the Rodyn like this,” Meldir muttered, handing the admittedly rather bizarre drawing back to Ranya. “That can’t possibly be what they actually look like.”

Ranya raised one fine eyebrow, before catching Elerâmâ’s eye. “My case, in point.” Straightening up in her seat, smoothing the piece of parchment-paper down on the wooden block, she was silent for a long time, as if gathering her thoughts.

For her part, Elerâmâ was having no trouble gathering her thoughts, and she had plenty to choose from.

Unlike Meldir, Elerâmâ could well believe that this was what Nessa of the Balī truly looked like. They who were, along with the architect, the makers of this world, Elerâmâ could not imagine that they had ever been particularly _normal_ -looking. Something so far beyond the Kwendî that they could crush them underfoot the way a Kwende might crush an ant underfoot, completely unaware that it had ever been there at all, must bear only the most superficial resemblance to a Kwende. And this Nessa looked as if she had had a lot of practice crushing Kwendî underfoot.

It would have been worse if she had been normal-looking. If this drawing of Nessa had come bearing the face of a normal person, it would have been so much worse. When a person who was composed of roughly the same materials as you had a secret, it was just a mystery. But when a person who was composed of materials so profoundly different from yours, when they were the sort of person who, if cut (if they could even be cut), would have bled power rather than whatever it was blood was made of, well, that was a lot more like a lie. If they presented themselves to you as a normal person, it was a deception, and a dangerous one, at that, for if you were fooled, then you were in the company of someone with power enough to kill you with one careless swat of their hand, and you would never know it, until your bones were crushed and your sight was dimming.

It was still unsettling, to see this creature who could never have successfully passed herself off as a Kwende and know that she was one of those who pretended at dominion over the earth. It was just somewhat less unsettling than it could have been.

And what was most unsettling of all was that Meldir apparently thought that Nessa should _not_ look like some disturbing parody of a Kwende. What did he think she should look like, then? Did he think she should look like a Kwende? Truly?

That was only part of the thoughts that Elerâmâ had gathered to herself, and what she touched on now was rather more interesting, for it was rather more near.

Ranya claimed that this was what Nessa of the Balī truly looked like. That meant that she had been in the presence of the Balī at least once—Elerâmâ did not doubt that if she had seen the bizarre creature depicted in the parchment-paper just once, the image would never have faded from her memory. It would have stayed there, seared into the fabric of her mind, for the rest of time.

So. Was Ranya a witness when the Balī destroyed Beleriand? Was she one of those lucky few who survived the massacre and watched from behind the gate of the mountains as the broken land was drowned beneath the merciless Sea? Had Ranya once resided in the Uttermost West, during that time when the Balī still pretended at gentleness and might have exerted themselves to dwell among Kwendî without crushing them beneath their careless feet? Was it perhaps both?

If Ranya was an Exile, that would explain some things. Her name, for one, which was definitely _not_ Sindarin as Meldir’s was. It rolled off the tongue easily for Elerâmâ, but she knew enough Sindarin by now to be reasonably confident that it was not a Sindarin name, and given Ranya’s apparent lack of real familiarity with Elerâmâ’s cradle tongue, Elerâmâ could guess that Ranya’s name originated from the tongue of the Exiles. Her eyes, her incredible, impossible _eyes_ , for another.

Elerâmâ knew little regarding the lands of the Uttermost West. Mother had never been there, obviously (and Elerâmâ could only pray that that was still true, that the Doomsman hadn’t stolen her soul, that she hadn’t been severed from the water that should have been her spirit’s right), and there were precious few Kwendî whom Elerâmâ had never known who had even _met_ an Exile, let alone known one well. What little Elerâmâ _did_ know suggested that the Uttermost West was a strange, strange land, full of potent magic beyond the ken of the Kwendî, and that it would have been only stranger, even more full of weird magics, when the trees of life yet lived. If Ranya was an Exile, perhaps she had dwelled in that land when those trees yet lived. Perhaps she had drunk of magic, and that magic had left its mark upon her body, a mark that would never leave no matter how many thousands of years passed on from her exile from that far-away land.

That still left a wealth of mystery swirling around Ranya, though. How she had come to be sitting here in this wagon besides Elerâmâ, why she had left the Uttermost West behind her, if she was indeed one of the ones who made the journey back into these lands, and exactly what she had been doing in the meantime, those were questions yet unanswered, questions yet cloaked in shadow.

Maybe she had picked up on a thread to follow during the journey, after all.

(Elerâmâ could almost hear her mother whispering at her to be careful, to be subtle, to direct things in such a way as to ensure that Ranya would _want_ to tell her all about it, by the time things progressed that far. But Elerâmâ, while she knew what her mother would have said to her, could not imagine how to act on that advice. All she knew how to do was what she was doing already, and no doubt she would stumble around when trying to do the rest. She’d try anyways. This was going to be a long journey, if not.)

In the meantime, Ranya seemed to have gathered her thoughts enough to speak. “This is indeed Nessa, a Queen of the Valar. Sister of Oromë, wife of Tulkas, you may not have heard all of this before, but trust me, it will all get very old, very quickly. Once we are in Lórinand, you should not ask certain members of our community to speak of you of the Valar, lest you wish for something that would be guaranteed to put you to sleep.” Ranya pressed a hand to her brow. “Even then, the sort of people who tend to expound… and _expound_ upon the Valar are the sort of people who would become mightily offended if you _actually_ fell asleep, and are also the sort of people who have it in your power to make living in Lórinand a mighty nuisance for you if they get it in their heads to do such a thing. So it would perhaps be better not to bring the Valar up to these people at all, if you can help it.”

“Unless you care to see how underhanded Ranya can get in a row,” Meldir cut in, a hint of laughter burbling at the back of his throat. “Her old training serves her very well in debates; it’ll be a show you’ll never forget.”

“ _What_ old training?” Ranya retorted, staring quizzically at his back. “I’ve been a painter my entire life, as _you well know._ ”

“Huh, you could have fooled me; I can remember a few times when you—“

Ranya made a strangled noise in the back of her throat; now it was _her_ who sounded like a cat being throttled. “Do I need to shut this window, so that you can’t be inappropriate in front of this child?”

Elerâmâ stared blankly at Ranya, then at Meldir.

Meldir cleared his throat, and even without getting a good look at his face, Elerâmâ thought his ears looked just a little pink. “Right you are. My apologies.”

Elerâmâ blinked. She devoted a few moments to trying to guess at what exactly they were going on about.

When she had devoted those few moments, she came away deciding that some questions were just better left unanswered.

Ranya breathed a deep sigh, her lips pursed in something between frustration and amusement as she, too, looked at Meldir’s back. “That man,” she muttered in an undertone. “Sometimes, he makes a joke of everything.” Then, she cleared her throat in a way that made Elerâmâ think she’d not really meant to speak aloud—something about the way the muscles in her neck strained, or maybe something about the way she squeezed her eyes shut for a moment, before opening them once more. “But yes, little one, that is truly the appearance borne by Nessa the Valië. At least, it is the appearance I have always known her to bear.

“The Valar are not like us, in that their bodies are more a suggestion than a firm expression of reality. They can assume and discard them at will, and their forms can vary wildly depending on their purpose and their mood. When their mood is one of joy, their appearance, too, is one that sparks joy in all who see them.”

Something hot and unsteady settled in Elerâmâ’s stomach. She would have thought it the consequence of her yet-ravenous appetite when it was time to eat, except that her body wasn’t assailed with the cold sweat she would have expected of nausea. Instead, this sensation was just something that sat inside of her, slippery and uneasy like a slug that feared the shadow of a bird far above.

Oh, the picture Ranya had painted for her. It was small, yet, and she could sense that it would yet grow larger, for Ranya did not at all seems like she was finished, and an image of simple joy was not nearly expansive enough to encompass what had been captured in the drawing Ranya had just now shown her. And even what she had said, oh, that certainly painted a picture for Elerâmâ. An appearance that sparked joy? An appearance that _always_ sparked joy? Huh, that certainly was something to think about.

Ranya leaned back against the wall of the wagon, folding her arms around her chest. She stared at the opposite end of the wagon, eyes half-open, jaw tight, as remembrance overtook her, and carried her away. “When they were happy, their forms were constructed in such a way as to make everyone who saw them happy, too. Their joy was our greatest delight,” she said, very softly, “and for most of us, our greatest wish was to make them even happier, to make sure that their joy would never cease, and we would never be robbed of the sight of their joyous forms. Telperion and Laurelin gave us so much light to sustain us, but the faces of the Valar in their joy and their glory were sort of a light that put even the light of the Trees to shade.

“But light must fade. Inevitably, light must fade. Telperion and Laurelin waxed and waned, and eventually they darkened forever. And so would the faces of the Valar darken, from time to time, before the time came before they grew unabatingly terrible, with no relief to be found in so much as an inch of their visages.”

Ranya smoothed down her rumpled skirt, her hands shaking slightly as she did so, though they were soon still again. “I have seen them in their wrath,” she muttered. She did not meet Elerâmâ’s gaze. “That is not something one forgets. Even if you see the Valar in their wrath from half a world away, even if all the evidence of it is confined to lightning storms and earthquakes and black clouds that cloak the land in their shadow, you will not forget it, if you are unfortunate enough to see it. They are done with us here, I think,” and the clear voice with which she spoke, devoid of even the slightest quaver, was not enough to hide the relief buried deep down. “They will not bother with the affairs of Endóre any longer. But even should I never see them again, even should I never again be allowed to walk the shores of Eldamar, I do not think I would forget their wrath.”

With that, she fell silent once more, and Elerâmâ stared at her in something like disbelief. That… that wasn’t how it _worked_. You couldn’t start on something like that and just cut yourself _off_. That wasn’t how telling stories _worked_.

But then, Ranya probably wasn’t a storyteller, was she? She’d said it herself: she was a painter. If Ranya wasn’t telling a story the way a story was supposed to work, that was likely only because she didn’t properly _know_ how it was supposed to work. Mother _had_ warned Elerâmâ that many members of her audience, when she, too, was a proper storyteller, just wouldn’t understand how stories were supposed to be told. She’d warned her that there would be some who would try to interrupt when the tale was one that didn’t bear interrupting, warned her that there would be still more who would not interact in tales that did not stand up on their own without the audience interacting with the storyteller. Mother had warned her that there would even be those who, having heard the story or a very similar before then, might be so ill-mannered as to go around trying to tell other members of the audience who had never heard the story before how this story was to end.

The mystery would not be lifted from the confines of this wagon unless Elerâmâ was able to hear the stories Ranya had to tell. And if she had to guide Ranya to the place where she could actually find herself _telling_ stories, so be it.

Elerâmâ squinted as she looked Ranya’s face up and down, trying to drink in every last twitch and clench of her expression. She couldn’t really call herself an expert on the way these things worked, but she felt that at least getting a good idea of what expression Ranya held on her face was where she should start.

She needed to find something to seize on, some loose thread that she could yank on and follow to its source. Except Elerâmâ really _wasn’t_ an expert at this, and even if she could identify a thread for what it was, she wasn’t sure how she would ever manage to yank on it.

Ranya was open enough to discussion to talk about it at all. Elerâmâ would have to just use that, and hope that whatever she hit on was something that would not shut down the discussion completely.

Elerâmâ drew a deep breath. _Just pick something._

“I…” Elerâmâ frowned, drawing another deep breath. She felt giddy, _so_ giddy, at the idea of having more knowledge regarding the Balī than her mother had ever been able to impart upon her. At the same time, she dreaded the idea that she might put a foot wrong and cause Ranya to never speak of such matters with her again. And there was another part of her, a part that should have been snuffed out long ago because, with few exceptions, shunning knowledge was something very much like a sin, that wondered if having more knowledge would profit her. Wondered if her life would be made better by knowing more of the beings who claimed dominion over a land they had so grievously wounded, or worse. “I’ve never seen anything like that,” she mumbled, for lack of anything else to _say_.

Ranya favored her with an exceptionally bitter smile. “Trust me when I say that you are lucky never to have seen the like. I have known many strong men and women who were utterly broken by the sight; I do not care to test your strength against theirs. They are gracious lords, of course,” she said, so abruptly and so hollowly that Elerâmâ winced at the very sound, so discordant as it was. “In their joy, they are gracious lords, and we never had any cause to complain in the youth of Valinor.” No less hollow was that. And only slightly less hollow came to Elerâmâ’s ears, “But when the joy of Valinor began to sour, when the days grew fraught with tension and the Eldar began to regard each other with suspicion and jealousy rather than the open trust we had once enjoyed, so, too, did the joy of the Valar begin to fade, and even before their wrath was made fully known to us, their forms began to change, and they gave us joy, no more.”

Elerâmâ stared at her, rapt and uneasy all at the same time. The outside world was drifting away from her, like flotsam and jetsam on the surface of a raging river. Now, the clopping of the horses’ hooves was like the rushing of water from miles downstream, and Meldir was such a distant consideration that he didn’t even show up on the horizon. “What… What did they look like?”

With a long, hard sigh, “What _didn’t_ they look like, that’s the more relevant question. I told you, physical appearance is more of a suggestion for the Ainur than a solid reality, more a dream-like thing than the immutable waking world. They can change their form at will, and though I am to understand that it is more difficult for the Maiar to simply trade one form for another, the power of the Valar is so far beyond theirs that what is difficult for one is about as difficult as blinking your eyes for the other. Form is truly nothing more than a suggestion for them, and it is a suggestion that can change as easily as we change our minds about what we want to eat for supper. Their forms change with their moods, and when their moods sour, so too do their forms begin to sour and curdle until what you see when they stand in their wrath is unrecognizable to the eyes of those who have ever seen them in their joy and contentment.”

Ranya reached out a hand, tapping her fingertips against the masked face of Nessa, her fingernail lingering over those dark, smeared (bloodied?) lips. “I saw Nessa many times, dancing on the lawns of Valmar, her attendants among the Maiar and the children of the Minyar—“ now, she was reaching up a hand to smooth down her gold hair, almost self-consciously, though Elerâmâ could not personally make the connection “—dancing all around her. Hours and hours they would dance, even though the Minyar must be growing exhausted. Sometimes, I would watch them fall to the ground, and then fail to get back up afterwards.” A jittery laugh escaped her mouth, her eyes visibly glazing over. “Can you imagine it? They just danced and danced and danced until they fainted. The Maiar would carry them off of the lawns to somewhere with shade and water, and Nessa would simply carry on dancing, never noticing. Can you imagine it?”

“I can’t,” Meldir remarked suddenly. Elerâmâ jumped, heart jolting, for while of course, logically, he’d not fallen out of reality while Ranya was speaking, Elerâmâ had completely forgotten about him for a few moments, and while he’d not fallen out of reality, really, he might as well have done. “I still think you’re making that up.”

A spate of laughter burst from Ranya’s lips, and it was as if a spell had been broken. The terrible brightness of her eyes was clear again, no hint of glaze in sight. “Oh, if only we could all be as innocent as you. Believe me, I would not weep to trade my knowledge for your ignorance—though you might weep at the knowledge imparted upon you.”

“For you, my dear, I would weep an ocean,” came Meldir’s gallant reply, “if it meant that you shed even one tear less.”

“Oh, dear, I see we are waxing expansive once more,” Ranya muttered, pinching the skin between her eyebrows with her thumb and her forefinger. But behind her hand, Elerâmâ could see that she was smiling. A thin, wry little smile, but a smile nonetheless. “Be careful not to drown in those tears before we reach Lórinand, Meldir. I’m not certain I know the way well enough not to get us hopelessly lost in the meantime.”

The glow of affection was soft and golden, a balmy warmth that could easily have turned back the chill of these past few spring nights. Sitting so close to the nimbus of light it put off, Elerâmâ could do nothing but shy away from it, her heart suddenly shriveling. Funny that such a thing like this could bring her present situation back to the forefront, such a benign, cheerful thing, but she could remember such moments as what occurred between her own parents. Of a different timbre, perhaps, with a different sort of history to fuel them, but still…

She could feel herself sinking back into the sort of numb, black despair that had seen her sit by the wagon for untold hours or days, while the rain drummed down upon her, while her parents’ bodies cooled and began to find themselves homes for grave worms and swarms of flies (she’d not seen that, but now that she thought of it, she could not imagine anything else), and their spirits flowed further and further into water, further and further from her. It would be so easy to sink back there, and never rise back out. Already, Elerâmâ perceived the colors of the world, confined as it currently was to the interior of this wagon, begin to fade, the myriad shades of the cushions going gray around the edges. Already, she could feel numbness creeping in on the edges of her heart, shriveling every nascent emotion she could have felt before it ever bobbed up to the surface.

Elerâmâ drew a deep, shuddering breath, and forced the gray away. No. She would make a mystery of herself, and not a rock that gathered moss and lichen. She would not sit still, even if she was to make of herself something that might yet become unrecognizable. She took another thick breath, and another, and another, and told herself that, over and over and over again, until the words were ingrained on the fabric of her mind, seared there so deeply that she hoped they would never be expunged.

She had convinced herself, at least for now. She had also succeeded in drawing attention to herself.

“Are you alright?” All of a sudden, Ranya’s hand was planted once more between Elerâmâ’s shoulders, and all of her attention was directed upon her, bright eyes scouring her face for any hint of… Actually, Elerâmâ could not pinpoint just what Ranya was looking for in her face. The list of things to choose from was just too long. “Are you nauseated?”

“I can stop the wagon if we need to,” Meldir assured them both. “We’re far enough away from that village, now; I think it might do us all some good to stop and walk around for a little bit.”

Ranya nodded distractedly. “Yes, I think that would be best. The fresh air would do us both some good.”

“But what did they look like when they were angry?” Elerâmâ asked as they were lowering themselves down out of the wagon, just a few moments later. Desperation pricked the edges of her voice, sharp and obtrusive. She hated how obvious it was that she was curious, hated how obvious it no doubt was to Ranya that she had been fishing for information. Hated the desperate curiosity that spurred her to press further, “How did their forms change when they were angry?”

Sunlight poured down upon Ranya’s head, turning her already fantastically-gold hair to something like sunlight itself, if sunlight could be caught in strands of hair. In that light, she looked utterly unreal, at least to Elerâmâ’s eyes. (She rather thought Meldir was looking at Ranya like she was utterly unreal as well, but that was neither here nor there.) Ranya regarded Elerâmâ in a long, considering silence, her hands diving into the pockets of her robe.

At length, Ranya shook her head, and Elerâmâ had to fight to keep it from becoming too obvious, just how much her heart sank in her chest. “I think not. Not right now, anyways.” Her gaze drifted to the countryside, fields of green grass and flowering trees and the blue ribbon of a far-off creek. “It is such a lovely day, and such a topic of conversation would be just the thing to spoil the atmosphere of such a day as this.”

“It wouldn’t,” Elerâmâ insisted, her voice edging to hardness.

“Not for you perhaps—“ bright, giddy laughter that wobbled only a little bit shivered in the air “—but it certainly would for me! Now, come; I know you have been bored in the wagon. You should take the opportunity to breathe of the fresh air while we have the chance.” Ranya drew her hands back out of her pockets, clasping them in front of her waist, knuckles white as they laced together. “I think I bear some of the blame for your boredom. When we must return to the wagon, I will share my drawing materials with you, if you so wish. If you have any facility for it at all, I think you will find it a more enjoyable way to pass the time than trying and failing to nap.”

That was an evasion, and Elerâmâ knew it. It wasn’t like _that_ was a mystery; Ranya had been quite straightforward about it. But Elerâmâ yet tread on such unsteady ground, and the idea of having the door shut in her face, the idea of never having any means of lifting the haze of mystery that shrouded Ranya from clear view, was so unbearable to her that she would not have pressed her now, past the point she already had, if the alternative was mortal peril. Elerâmâ had more confidence in her ability to evade mortal peril (she was, after all, yet very small, and those who were capable of introducing mortal peril were more likely to overlook those who were very small), than she did in her ability to resurrect a mystery that had been killed stone-dead before her very eyes.

So Elerâmâ did not press Ranya any further. Instead, she nodded, and thanked her for the prospective distraction. She was not sure how effective it would be. Elerâmâ had never drawn very much, as parchment-paper was a rare commodity at home and she had quickly become frustrated when things she drew in the sand on the riverbank were quickly swallowed up by the lapping waters of the river. Elerâmâ _had_ learned how to write in Sindarin (in Cirth, rather than Tengwar), but she’d had little chance to hone her skills on that score. Still, drawing was a different beast than writing, and if it was something to do that wasn’t lying on her side on thin cushions…

For the rest of the day, while they were stretching their legs outside, and then later when they were back in the wagon, trundling ever further down the road, Elerâmâ’s thoughts would wander far from where her body lied. While she was walking aimlessly in a circle through the soft, sweet-smelling grass, trying to ignore what Ranya and Meldir were whispering to each other down the gentle slope, while she was sitting in the wagon, doodling just as aimlessly on a sheet of parchment-paper, her mind would wander far, far, far from the place where her body dwelled, to lands where she could not go, would never willingly go.

Elerâmâ was perfectly content with the state of affairs as they were, regarding the Balī. If they were done with these lands, if they had finally abandoned them, then to Elerâmâ, that was nothing but a relief. Creatures so far beyond anything that dwelled in these lands that they could crush them underfoot the way Elerâmâ would crush an ant—unknowing, uncaring—had no place here. Elerâmâ did not want to share a world with such creatures; even knowing that they were out of the Circles of the World in the Uttermost West was little comfort, when that bit of knowledge was coupled with the knowledge that, with their power, the Balī could easily make the journey here, if they so chose. There were times when she contemplated the merits of growing attached to _anything_ in this world, when she knew that the Balī could easily make the journey east and destroy it all, if it served their purposes to do so.

But it was useless to avoid becoming attached to things in this world, was it? It would happen whether you wanted it to or not, whether you realized you were doing it, or not? Her parents had been…

Her parents.

Yes, her parents.

And now, they were gone, and the place where they had been was an open wound still oozing blood, something Elerâmâ had to actively distract herself from to keep from dwelling upon it every moment of the day. The attachment she had borne them was still there, but it was severed, dangling limply from her body, and that was oozing blood as well, a wound that Elerâmâ could only hope would one day close. (If it closed, it would leave a scar behind. She knew that much. She was waiting for it. The scar would at least be numb.)

But she could not help but think about it, you know. Ranya might not have been a storyteller by trade, might not have even been a storyteller by inclination, but though she’d touched on Nessa only briefly, the image she had left behind in Elerâmâ’s mind was a vivid one. Vivid enough that the image dwelled in the forefront of her mind for the rest of the day, like a snail stubbornly affixed to a broad and flat river stone.

As Ranya said, she was indeed imagining it. Elerâmâ had never been to the lands of the Uttermost West, and had heard them described only sparingly. But she could imagine a green lawn, and she could imagine dancers. She imagined a creature with too many arms and legs, most of which did not look like _any_ arms or legs you would have ever found on the body of a Kwende, a creature with a deer’s skull for a mask, pulled so far down over her face that only her lips were visible. She constantly danced, danced, danced, and as she danced, she held in one of her many hands a long and fearsome whip, to which was attached a multitude of golden bells.

Who could say what was crushed beneath the feet of Nessa the Primordial Dancer? Who could say what the dancers who attended upon her in the bouts saw in the proximity of this creature of ancient power, this creature of creation, for surely anyone who danced in the company of Nessa must see visions beyond the ken of any Kwende. But what happened when Nessa took her dancing on the move? What happened when she no longer danced in joy, but in careless anger or heedless wrath? What became of the world then? Did Nessa still watch where her feet went? Did she still take care not to crush under her feet anything too fragile to withstand the blows? Had she ever exercised such care to start with? Elerâmâ could more easily believe that she had not, this great and terrible dancer who never noticed if any of the dancers who spun and swirled about her fainted from thirst or exhaustion. Such a one as her likely noticed little of what was going on around her, unless it was the work of her fellows. Everything beneath that was more likely to be beyond her ability to notice.

If Nessa ever chose to visit these lands east of the Sundering Sea, Elerâmâ thought her only recourse might be simply to make sure that she was as far away from Nessa as it was possible to be, without being either underwater, or dead.

But with a whip like that, she would always have some warning of Nessa’s approach. The bells would signal her approach from miles away…

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Anār** —a Primitive Quendian name for the Sun, derived from the root ‘anár-.’  
>  **Balī** —the Valar (singular: Bálā) (Primitive Quendian); derived from the root ‘BAL-‘, meaning ‘power’  
>  **Belain** —Valar (singular: Balan) (Sindarin); a somewhat less common Sindarin name for the Valar than the more widely-used ‘Rodyn’  
>  **Eldar** —‘People of the Stars’ (Quenya); a name first given to the Elves by Oromë when he found them by Cuiviénen, but later came to refer only to those who answered the summons to Aman and set out on the March, with those who chose to remain by Cuiviénen coming to be known as the Avari; the Eldar were composed of these groups: the Vanyar, Ñoldor (those among them who chose to go to Aman), and the Teleri (including their divisions: the Lindar, Falmari, Sindar and Nandor).  
>  **Endóre** —Middle-Earth (Quenya)  
>  **Kwende** —the Primitive Quendian name for an Elf, later adapted as the Quenya ‘Quendë’ (plural: Kwendî)  
>  **Kwendî** —the Primitive Quendian name for the Elves, later adapted as the Quenya ‘Quendi’ (singular: Kwende)  
>  **Lindórinand** —‘Vale of the Land of Singers’ (Nandorin); one of the original names given to Lothlórien by its first, Nandorin inhabitants.  
>  **Lórinand** —‘Valley of Gold’ (Nandorin); one of the many other names of Lothlórien  
>  **Minyar** —‘Firsts’, the first clan of the Elves of Cuiviénen, who were named for Imin and Iminyë, the former of whom was the first Elf to awaken. The Ñoldor called them ‘Vanyar’, ‘Fair ones’ (rendered in Primitive Quendian as ‘wanjā’, and rendered in Telerin as ‘Vaniai’), due to the nearly-universal trait of fair hair among the clan, but even in Aman, they still often referred to themselves as ‘Minyar.’ (Singular: Minya) (Adjectival form: Minyarin)  
>  **Rodyn** —Valar (singular: Rodon) (Sindarin): a common Sindarin name for the Valar


	7. Chapter Seven

The rest of the day was rather more bearable, Elerâmâ having had that break to walk around and ease the stiffness of her disused legs, but even in spring-approaching-summer, day was fleeting, and night was soon upon them, soon upon _her_ , beckoning towards sleep, and all the things that waited for Elerâmâ in sleep.

Her mother was with her. That was the only thing that remained constant throughout the phantasmagoria that engulfed her while night sunk the land down in darkness. Her mother was with her, but when Elerâmâ looked up at her mother, searching for a reassuring glance or smile, she could not see her face. She searched all over for any sign of her mother’s face, but there was a neck, a mane of thick, curly, unbound hair, and a cloud of smoky shadow where any feature of her face should have been. She had no face, and she did not speak.

Her hand clasped Elerâmâ’s in her own, and she led Elerâmâ gently enough to whatever sight it was she wanted her to see next, but there was nothing to her hand that resembled the hands that Elerâmâ had known when her mother was still alive. None of the calluses Elerâmâ would have expected where there; neither was that little scar that formed the shape of a nearly-perfect circle on her mother’s palm, just below the base of her forefinger. Her fingernails were too smooth, too cleanly clipped; Mother’s fingernails had been uneven and ragged, from constant hard work outside and the occasional bouts of nail-biting. Even her hand, itself, was not constructed correctly. This hand was closer in size to Elerâmâ’s than her mother’s had ever been, the fingers too short and too slender.

It was not her mother’s hand, this hand that belonged to the creature that did not have her mother’s face. Why Elerâmâ had decided that this must be her mother, she would never understand once sunlight was spilling over her face and she was awake once more. It was just one of the aspects of a dream. It made sense, when she was in the dream, to assume that this was her mother. It was the most natural thing in the world, and it never occurred to her to assume that this could be anyone but her mother.

In the dream, she had also forgotten that her mother was dead. That might have been part of it.

They walked together, hand in hand, through the dim fogbanks of the dream. Well, ‘walked’ might not be the best word for what they had been doing. There was no ground that Elerâmâ could see, no ground anywhere, just more dark fog glittering with the faint suggestions of stars. Elerâmâ went through the motions of walking, put one foot over the other as she strode forward, but her feet never touched anything that felt like solid ground. What they touched pulsed gently, gave gently, and felt ever like they would tear and rip and she would go plummeting through the hole left there, if she rested her foot too firmly upon it. It did not encourage lingering, that much was for sure. And even if Elerâmâ had felt inclined to linger anywhere, the thing that did not have her mother’s hands or her face was drawing her ever further on, further away from where they had started.

She never saw anything clearly, no matter how far they walked together. There was nothing that could make its presence known clearly above the gently flowing mists. But that was not to say that the mists were empty; the longer Elerâmâ walked, the more clear it became that they were not empty at all.

Her blindness was not a blessing.

Thunder cracked, shaking this world of dense fog to its foundations. The stars trapped within the banks shivered and flickered, like candle flames blown upon by a bored child—and the idea of bored children, bored children of cosmic power and proportions lumbering through the mist, was enough to make Elerâmâ’s heart quicken as she tried to navigate through the haze.

‘Navigate’ wasn’t really the word for it, just like ‘walking’ hadn’t really been the word for it a while ago. There was no path, not as such. Elerâmâ had tried to fool herself into believing that there was one earlier, but once she actually tried to move about with a purpose, she was at once acutely aware that there was no path, no destination, no beginning point, and nowhere she could take shelter if the ground started to give out beneath her. Nothing to do but keep moving, growing more and more lost, and hoping that, eventually, one way or another, she would come to an ending.

Thunder cracked and boomed once again, so loud that Elerâmâ’s teeth rattled in her skull. Somewhere she could not see—so it could be anywhere, really—there was a roar of rushing water. Thick and heavy with moisture grew the air, the chill of the humidity creeping down past her skin into her bones. All around her was that roar, so that, though the ground remained the same soft, giving whatever it had been since she had first found herself here, Elerâmâ now expected to find herself standing on a bridge and to see the rush of tons upon tons of gray and white and silver water, but when she chanced a look down, there was nothing but fog, shifting, swirling wheels of gray and white and dark.

_Where are we going?_ she asked Not-Mother, trying to tug her hand free of the one that held her. When she found that grip to be a grip of iron, she fought against the grip more urgently, her breath coming from her mouth in choked gasps that turned into choking coughs as the wet dove down into her throat and tried to throttle the breath right out of her lungs. _Where are we going? Please, won’t you tell me?_ she pleaded.

Not-Mother did not tell her. Not-Mother never said a word to her. Not-Mother did not let go. Not-Mother never took notice of when her iron grip began to hurt. Elerâmâ was not certain that this creature, whom she would not really recognize as being something entirely separate from her mother until Anār rose over the eastern hills and cracked the world of her dream like the fragile shell of an egg, understood anything at all but the unknown path that she followed, the path that was no path to Elerâmâ’s searching, frantic eyes.

All around them, more noises were rising out of the fog, each more disconcerting than the last. A cracking like the cracking Elerâmâ imagined would fill the air with its screeching dissonance when the architect finally decided they had had enough and commenced the breaking of the world echoed all around them. She would have shut it out if she could. If she could have had both of her hands free, they would have flown up to her ears and she would have pressed them so tightly flat against her skull that all blood flow would have been cut off and her ears would have been as numb and insensate as the hairs on her head. It would not have been enough. No measure Elerâmâ could have taken, up to and including driving a sharpened stick into each of her ears until blood poured from each of them and she could hear nothing at all—nothing but this, anyways. Even if she could hear nothing else, this would still have been horribly vivid in her ears, something that drowned out all other sound. This sound was inviolate, and insistent, and even those among the living who were completely and utterly deaf would have been able to hear it as someone with full hearing could hear a gust of wind rustling the leaves of the trees above their heads. It was all-encompassing, not something that anyone of Elerâmâ’s power could ever hope to deny.

But then, there rose something over it, something so great and powerful that even the screeching dissonance of the breaking of the world must bow to it and become less in volume, the better to give it primacy.

Elerâmâ could yet see nothing. The star-hung fog yet swirled and puckered and dipped as if nothing was happening, as if this realm was a realm of endless tranquility and the noises that rocked the world and made storm-shivering branches out of Elerâmâ’s bones were something totally removed from this place. Not-Mother certainly behaved as though there was nothing to worry about, though, again, it was entirely likely that anything like worry was totally beyond her.

She could see nothing, and the unknown substance that passed for ground remained, if not solid, then at least reasonably firm beneath her feet. But she could hear what was coming up over the cracking that could only be the breaking of the world. She could hear that.

Not that, at the very first, Elerâmâ understood just what it was. Though it was loud enough to make itself heard over the screeching cracks the echoed through this realm of mist, those same screeching cracks were yet loud enough that all she could do was hear the other sound. She was not yet at the point where she could piece together just what that sound _was_. She could scarcely hear herself think; listening to what was going on around her, truly listening, was rather beyond her at this juncture.

But while she was dragged on by the tight grip and ever-moving feet of the thing that aped her mother’s appearance, Elerâmâ had time to grow accustomed to the new sound. More than that, the screech of the cracking was growing somewhat lesser, quieting just enough that the other sound, which had already taken primacy, could _truly_ take its place as the thing that would become so all-consuming that even the totally deaf could hear it.

At the first toll, Elerâmâ cringed, not bothering to scream, for she knew her screams would have been utterly lost in the reverberations that threatened to shatter her skull. The sound was so loud and so deep that, indeed, she felt as though it might shatter her skull if it went on for too long; certainly, it made every bone in her body ache as if she’d been beaten into the ground with the oaken shaft of a spear. Not-Mother’s hand was tight upon her own, and her legs kept on moving, the better to keep from risking sinking into the too-giving floor beneath her, but she whimpered as she walked, her knees quaking against each other.

The cracking had stopped. For a long moment, there was silence.

And then, another toll.

Through her agony, Elerâmâ’s mind raced. Her curiosity was still rooted in her mind, even in this strange place, even when it must dwell in a body lanced through with a thousand different pains. Curiosity still worked, even when the rest of her was furiously trying to give its letter of resignation. Feverishly did she work to piece together what the sound could be.

There came another toll, and another, and another, and as the agony was hers over and over again, Elerâmâ gained enough experience of it that oh, she did know that sound, after all.

Her blood ran cold.

But it made so much sense, did it not? Elerâmâ herself had thought that anyone with ears to hear must be able to hear the ringing of the bells from miles away.

-0-0-0-

“Elroval? Hey, Elroval, can you hear me?”

She could, in fact, hear him, but Elerâmâ did not at first understand what Meldir was trying to say. She was sitting at the base of an oak tree, scribbling on a fresh piece of parchment-paper that Ranya had given her earlier that morning, while they were still riding in the wagon. At present, Elerâmâ was trying to draw a lily-flower, though the result looked rather more like a block of wood that had been broken into several jagged points.

She had shown Ranya one of her other very poorly-done drawings earlier, and rather than rolling her eyes or dismissing her, Ranya had offered her the wry little ghost of a sympathetic smile. _My earliest drawings were rather like that, too. I know it must be frustrating to you, if you do this for any reason other than an idle way to pass the time, but I’m afraid that the only way to get better at drawing is to just keep on drawing_.

That was… something. Elerâmâ did not think that she wanted to make her way through the world as an artist—or, if she did, she’d not yet made her peace with the idea, and it might be a long time before she could—but she didn’t like the idea of being bad at something. Not forever. The idea that she could get better at drawing if she just kept on drawing had a certain appeal. Alas, Ranya had taken only so many sheets of parchment-paper with her on this trip (and Elerâmâ still had not discovered exactly what purpose this trip of hers and Meldir’s had been meant to accomplish), and Elerâmâ had only been given a set amount of pieces of parchment-paper to draw on until they reached Lórinand. So. She must conserve space when she did her scribblings, and thus, her weird, jagged-wood-looking flower shared space with a blob that was supposed to be a tree, a blob that was supposed to be a cat, and a strange, mutilated thing that, when she was drawing it, Elerâmâ would have sworn was a horse, but had resolved itself into something that could never have been a horse, except perhaps after the grave worms, the flies, the wolves, the vultures, and perhaps the crows as well had gotten done with it. Even then, she thought the thing that was left over from all that scavenging would have borne more resemblance to a horse than what Elerâmâ had produced with her graphite stick.

It was not something she had a natural talent for, obviously. As Ranya said, she would just have to keep practicing, and see what she could produce after enough practice.

While Elerâmâ had no natural talent for drawing, it had proven a welcome distraction from everything else that could have ruled her these past few days, and thus, she had thrown herself into it with something very close to zeal.

Enough zeal that she’d not looked up when Meldir had started talking. He’d not said anything about their needing to pile back into the wagon, and as far as she was concerned, he clearly wasn’t addressing _her_. She’d honestly thought he was talking to Ranya, though later, she would remember that Ranya had, at the time, stepped back into the wagon to discard her outer robe, in the face of the world suddenly turning towards unseasonal heat.

It was only when Meldir jostled her shoulder and again called out “Elroval?” that Elerâmâ finally looked up from her drawing.

She blinked against the strong sunlight pouring out from behind the edges of Meldir’s body, frowning up at him. “What is it?”

He clapped her shoulder again, trying to pin a smile to his mouth, though Elerâmâ was more interested in watching the way that smile just kept on floundering, like a fish flung upon dry land. Like a man who could not decide whether he should be smiling at all. “I was trying to get your attention. You were off in your own world, just now.”

Elerâmâ’s frown deepened. She had _not_ ; even if she’d not been really listening, she’d been aware of him talking. But, had he really been… “Why didn’t you say my name, if you were trying to get my attention?”

Meldir raised an eyebrow. “I did…”

“’Elroval?’ Really?”

Ranya had appeared once more at the back of the wagon. She had, just as promised, shucked the long-sleeved robe she had been wearing over her dress (A pale golden, this morning). The dress had no sleeves, was heavily embroidered at the skirt hem with images of red flowers and silver fish, and was bound tightly around the waist with a wide sash of black velvet shot through with tiny purple beads. The combination of colors was, in certain places, mildly discordant, but the confidence with which she wore those mildly discordant clothes pushed the noticing of it out of Elerâmâ’s mind. If Ranya even noticed that some of the colors didn’t really match, she’d not said one word.

And the colors of her clothes were clearly not what was on Ranya’s mind.

Ranya almost laughed as she regarded a suddenly-defensive Meldir, tapping one of her fingers against her chin. Though the burst of almost-laughter still clung to the edges of her lips, her jaw was tight. “I mean, really, Meldir? That’s a horrible name for a little girl.”

“I just thought that if we called her by the Sindarin translation, she could still go around using her actual name.”

“But Elroval isn’t really very _pleasing_ to the ear, now is it?”

“And that’s not my name,” Elerâmâ interjected. It really _wasn’t_ , and the idea of going through life being called by a mangled version of the name her parents had given her was about as welcome as being asked to wear chain mail against her naked skin. She looked to Ranya, her frown morphing into a scowl. “ _You_ said I could pick the name I’d call myself in Lórinand.”

To that, Ranya nodded crisply. “I did. And you shall.” When she turned her attention back to Meldir, it was to smile gently, though gentleness was still a rather odd thing to be found on the face of such a woman as her. “Come now, we must allow her that.” A cloud drifted over her face briefly, the light of her eyes pouring out of it like Anār had been twinned in the midst of a thunderstorm—or perhaps if Anār and Ranā sat in the sky at the same time in the midst of a thunderstorm; Elerâmâ really could not say. “If she is to adopt a different name, it should be one of her own choosing.”

Elerâmâ regarded Ranya, the distastefulness of having to discard the name her parents had given her at all for the moment forgotten in the face of _this_. Once again, she was presented with a sight that tantalized her with the promise of a mystery solved, but that, frustratingly, infuriatedly, would give her no more than this tiny insight into the heart of a woman who was yet so very mysterious to her. Elerâmâ knew little of the Exiles beyond the fact that they were an unfortunate people who had been cast out of the Uttermost West, and all she had learned of Ranya since then was that she was someone who had many times watched Kwendî collapse in exhaustion while Nessa continued to swirl and spin in her dances, oblivious or uncaring. Elerâmâ yet knew so little of her.

But from this, she thought she could guess something, whether Ranya knew she was presenting her with the hint, or not. Ranya was perhaps (or perhaps not, but Elerâmâ was growing increasingly confident of this guess by the day) someone who had once had to change her name. She was someone who perhaps, to this day, was going by a name other than one of the ones her parents had given her.

The second guess, Elerâmâ was somewhat less confident of than the first. The first one, she would stubbornly cling to until the time came when it was definitively disproven. Ranya was so much touchier when it came to the topic of the new name Elerâmâ must give herself ere they reached Lórinand than was Meldir. Meldir was treating it as though it was some sort of game—though Elerâmâ had not forgotten that strain of unease souring his voice when he had first brought up the issue—as if a name was something that had so little importance that it could be affixed and detached at will. But Ranya was different. Every time the matter was brought up to her, she reacted a little as if she had just been struck. Ranya never brought the matter up on her own.

To Ranya, it was not a game. It was not a game at all. And that made Elerâmâ like her a little more—for it was not a game to her, either, not a game at all.

But she still had to pick out a new name, and she had absolutely no intention of letting someone else choose it for her. So, it was time to start thinking. If she could stomach it, anyways.

-0-0-0-

The heat that had seen Ranya discarding her outer robe that one morning persisted as they made the journey ever further south, and maybe west as well? Elerâmâ could not tell, and she had long since given up what little effort she had ever made at tracking what direction they were traveling in.

She’d not really taken back up the responsibility she had to her mother’s memory, to drink in the sight of the landscape. She’d tried, really she had, but she just couldn’t. Every time she tried, the rolling hills furthest off to the horizon, those whose features were ironed out entirely into shapes of green and dark, became the lumps she’d seen on the rainy, muddy road. She kept imagining that she would see blood pour from those hills, and she could do nothing but turn her eyes away and curl up on her side on her bench in the wagon, holding her sides with clenched hands.

Becoming someone else and making a mystery of herself was looking more attractive by the hour. Now, if only Elerâmâ could figure out just how she was to do that.

In the meantime, she still had a nut to crack sitting across from her at the bench.

Ranya had put down her block of wood, her piece of parchment-paper and her well-used graphite stick. She pushed back the curtain closest to her head, and was staring out of the window as Elerâmâ presently found herself incapable of doing, one hand pressed to her mouth, her sunlight-and-moonlight-combined-together-bright eyes slightly unfocused. It was getting easier for Elerâmâ to discern the expressions held in Ranya’s eyes, and she thought that Ranya looked rather abstracted, almost lost.

Elerâmâ knew the feeling. She was feeling quite lost herself, and not only because she was further from home than she had ever been, and had no familiarity with the surrounding lands.

But she was going to have to lose herself even further, if she wanted to make a mystery of herself, if she wanted to make herself a mystery that could only be unraveled by those who loved her enough to go on a quest for answers that could last them years, even decades. Her parents gone, Elerâmâ could not imagine anyone else ever loving her enough to exert that sort of effort. She could not imagine anyone else ever looking at the mystery she had made of herself, the confusing questions that seemingly had no answers, at least none that could be unearthed without a lot of patience, a lot of intelligence, and not a little cunning and stubbornness, and being willing to make that sort of effort. Not for her.

Her parents would have made that sort of effort, she was certain of it, but who would look at her, as she was now, and feel similarly? Who would look at Elerâmâ, in the guise of whatever name she chose for herself before reaching Lórinand, and feel strongly enough to devote so much time and effort, and no doubt weariness and grief as well, to finding the real person hidden beneath the masks and the mysteries and the questions that seemed to lead only to more questions.

If she could make that of herself, Elerâmâ thought it might take more years than it would take an intrepid mystery-solver to disentangle it. She wondered, sometimes, if she would be able to really exert the effort, knowing that there may well never come along anyone willing to disentangle the mystery.

For after all, what use was a mystery that had no one around looking for a way to solve it? A mystery that no one ever bothered to solve was just another broken ring, something that would never complete itself no matter how many times it spun round and round. Elerâmâ already felt herself a broken ring. She would not care to become one twice-over.

As for Ranya, Elerâmâ was wondering, increasingly, if she wasn’t a broken ring, herself. There was a part of her that did not seem to be quite—

“I rather wish it could be this warm all year round,” Ranya remarked suddenly. “The world would undeniably be a more pleasant place without winter in it.”

Herself, Elerâmâ had made a great deal of fun for herself in the winter with the snow that fell down from the generous sky. So long as she was properly dressed for it, winter had never bothered her overly much, so long as it was the snowy part of winter, and not the part of winter that just poured down rain in gray sheets that would freeze overnight and cover the earth in slippery ice. She was possessed of a reasonable amount of fondness for winter, so long as winter was not too hard on her—and she’d never known it to be _too_ hard on her; there had been no Fell Winters in Elerâmâ’s lifetime.

So, the reasonable thing to do was ask about it, wasn’t it? “Why do you say that?”

Ranya’s hand drifted up to her furrowed brow, as a single choked laugh escaped from her mouth. “Oh, little one, there are many of us who do not care for the cold. I, myself, have had more than my fill of it. I’ve had enough winter to last me until the very breaking of the world, and I can only suppose that Arda as it should have been made will never feel the touch of winter upon it again. Winter is such an incredible mistake of nature that I can only assume that it is one of the inventions of Morgoth when he wished to lay waste to all the hard work the rest of the Ainur put in to crafting this world.”

Well. That was… that was quite a strong opinion. Elerâmâ wondered what exactly had given birth to it.

One way to find out.

“W-why…”

“Don’t scare the child,” Meldir called in through the gap in the panels of wood.

Ranya shot a… Elerâmâ could only describe it as a _strong_ look at his back. She deliberately—Elerâmâ could only describe _that_ in such a way, because it seemed entirely too manufactured to be something that she was doing unconsciously, without some conscious desire not to, as Meldir put it, “scare the child”—softened her expression before turning her attention back to Elerâmâ. When she did turn to look at Elerâmâ, Elerâmâ could see in her eyes—oh, how things had progressed, that she could discern such things in Ranya’s eyes—a pale shadow of winter, the horror of memory of ice and snow. Another strong look, that, one that left a strong impression on Elerâmâ, one that she did not think would leave her for a long while.

Ranya tried to smile, but that just did not work, and soon, she dropped the attempt. “You know that I am an Exile,” she said softly. “After what I have said to you before, I cannot imagine that that is still unknown to you; I am well-aware that our people, all the world over, are aware that my people were exiled from Valinor long ago.”

No, Elerâmâ had not gone through life unaware of that. She had never met an Exile—there was that confirmed to her, beyond all doubt—before Ranya, but though her mother had told her few stories of them, she had still heard the stories. The Exiles were just… They were just a very _unfortunate_ people. That was the biggest impression Elerâmâ had taken away; they were very unlucky, very _unfortunate_. Those creatures who claimed dominion over this earth, and even though that claim had to be a lie because nothing could truly reign over this earth, they certainly had a great deal of power to _influence_ it, held the Exiles in a high amount of disfavor. Elerâmâ knew that much.

But she did not know _why_. The stories truly were very limited, and none of them had ever said for certain why those beings who, though they might not rule over the earth, certainly had the power to make the lives of everyone who lived on the earth very miserable indeed, had soured so thoroughly on the Exiles as they had to make them the unfortunate, unhappy people that they were. Elerâmâ could not fathom why the Balī would care. What could make such creatures who could crush Kwendî underfoot without even thinking, who thought nothing of destroying whole lands while in the throes of their battles with their former compatriots, take close enough notice of the affairs of the Kwendî to decide that there was a special group of them that they did not like?

“I… I have heard a little about that.” It occurred to Elerâmâ that this might be a bit of a touchy subject for Ranya, even thousands of years later. “I…” She stared down at her hands. “I don’t really know why.”

“Such innocence,” Ranya mumbled. Now, Elerâmâ was looking at Ranya’s face again, just in time for Ranya herself to start staring at her own hands. “I can’t say I’m very used to it. I don’t think there has been a single community that I have visited, in all my time on this side of the Sea, that did not know exactly what the Exiles did to _become_ Exiles, and how exactly it is that we came to be here, and what we suffered to reach these eastern shores of the Sundering Sea. It’s…” She paused, laughing oddly. “It’s an odd feeling, Eleráma. I’m not entirely certain that I like it.”

Panic boiled in Elerâmâ’s stomach, making the gentle heat within the wagon turn to something closer kin to the interior of an oven. “I’m sorry,” she blurted out.

Was she offended? Was she angry? Would she withdraw from Elerâmâ for the rest of the journey, and share no more information with her, leaving the mystery to stand totally intact, with the only pieces of it that Elerâmâ had unraveled the only ones she would _ever_ have unraveled? The idea of it was almost physically painful to Elerâmâ; on top of how incredibly dull it would make the rest of the journey, without this to distract her, she knew exactly where her mind would start to live, once more.

But Ranya waved a hand, not quite dismissively, but certainly without any hard feelings that Elerâmâ could discern. “Don’t be sorry. We did it to ourselves, and we did it long before you were born. I will not get too far into it; the full story of how we came to be exiled would occupy us for the rest of this journey and probably a fair distance beyond the borders of Lórinand, and somehow, I doubt you wish to be occupied by the tale _quite_ that long. You’ll have plenty of opportunities to learn the full history in Lórinand, and in situations where you can put the tale down and do something else if you so wish, as well. And the whole of the story is not what you have asked me for, have you?

“When we left Valinor, the Valar told us that they would not stop us from leaving, but that they would not render us any aid, either. If we wished to return to Endóre, we must do so under our own power, with no help from those who had brought us to Valinor in the first place.

“We…” Ranya visibly shook, her shoulders quaking so violently that, for a moment, Elerâmâ found herself pressing her back hard against the opposite wall of the wagon, certain that Ranya was going to throw up onto the floor of the wagon and trying to do whatever she could to make sure she wouldn’t be splattered with vomit. That was just about the _last_ thing she wanted to happen to her, today. But Ranya composed herself, drawing a deep, steadying breath through her nose before resuming: “We obtained ships. They were… They were dearly bought,” she choked out. “But certain of our party betrayed the rest, and destroyed them after they sailed them over to Endóre themselves. By that time, we had been well and truly exiled, and could only have returned if we submitted ourselves to the Valar for judgment and, most likely, punishment.” Ranya’s mouth twisted in a harsh, ugly line. “There were some willing to subject themselves to that. Arafinwë led a whole host of them back to Tirion. But the rest of us were not so willing to give up, even then. There was a whole world out there, if we could only find a way to reach it. And we—“ she sighed “—we, umm, we felt that we had gone too far to go back. So.” Elerâmâ clapped one hand against her thigh. “We needed a way to reach Endóre. And, in the wastes of Araman, we found it.

“Tell me, Eleráma. Have you ever heard of the Helcaraxë?”

Elerâmâ wracked her brains for any memory of that word. Ranya had put so much weight upon it that surely, _surely_ it must feature in some stories of its own. But Elerâmâ had never heard any such story. No story her mother or any of the storytellers in the village had ever told her featured some place or some creature or some whatever called the Helcaraxë. It was a complete mystery to her.

Hopefully, it wouldn’t stay that way for much longer.

Elerâmâ shook her head, and stared expectantly at Ranya.

Ranya, for her part, did not seem interested in disappointing her. She flashed Elerâmâ an intensely bitter smile, another expression of her bitterness fit to curdle the air around her. (Elerâmâ wondered just what sort of life the woman had led, that she had so much bitterness within her to bring to bear.) “The Helcaraxë, when translated from Quenya into Sindarin, bears the name of the Grinding Ice. That alone should provide you with a very specific image. It is one that has been carried down through every generation of Exiles since the ones who made the journey east, returning to the lands from whence they came.”

‘Grinding Ice.’ Oh, yes, that did provide Elerâmâ with a very specific image. It was not one that she particularly thought she _liked_.

But Ranya was too lost in her own reminiscences to notice Elerâmâ’s dislike of any images or imagined sensations. She folded her arms about her chest, each hand resting on the elbow of the opposite arm. “The Helcaraxë was—though I have never made the journey that far north to see it for myself, I have heard tell that when the shape of the world was changed, the Helcaraxë was destroyed, and if that is the case, I can only declare myself satisfied—a bridge of ice and rock connecting Aman and Endóre in the far north of the world. I wonder, sometimes, if it was a relic of a more stable stretch of land, but those thoughts are pointless, and best left for discussions with the philosophers.

“By the time we came upon it, that land was not stable any longer. Well did we name it the Grinding Ice, for the sheets of ice that made up the majority of the land often crashed into each other, grinding upwards, so that towers of ice rent the dark sky like jagged teeth in a broken jaw.

“It was cold,” Ranya whispered. She rubbed at her left arm reflexively. “It was so cold, always. We burned what wood we had, burned whatever other materials we could obtain. By the end of it, we had begun the burning of books, though mercifully, we reached Endóre before we had to burn too many of them. But no fire we lit could chase away the cold. The cold reached down into the depths of our spirits and froze our hearts, froze our minds, froze the seat of our courage. We were not the valiant people we had fancied ourselves. We were little more than animals, driven by the overriding need to survive what torment we now put ourselves to.

“It was so cold, and we were so hungry, always. There were animals, that far north, but they were few and far between, and they were animals who would sooner prey upon us than serve us as our food. We had set out on the journey having no idea how long it would take, and thus, we’d not known just how much food we should take with us. Our situation soon became dire. We lost…” Ranya’s hands shook. “We lost so many of our friends and our families to the privations we suffered there. Many died of starvation. Many were killed by the animals we attempted to hunt. Still more drowned or died after being crushed between sheets of ice. I…”

Now, Ranya stared blankly at the opposite wall of the wagon from where she sat, as if seeing something entirely different from what was actually there. The look in her eyes was…

Elerâmâ could not look at her eyes for more than a moment before turning away. The aversion of her gaze had little to do with the brightness of Ranya’s eyes.

And for once, she had no desire to know what lied on the other end of the silence from that simple “I.” She did not think it would have brought her any happiness. Ranya knew—of course, she knew; the knowledge had originated within her own mind—and plainly, it brought _her_ little happiness. Perhaps that was a component of the mystery that was Ranya and her past that would come into the stores of Elerâmâ’s knowledge someday. Perhaps not. Elerâmâ would not press the issue, now. She did not think she knew exactly when she would actually be up to the task of pressing that particular issue.

The Helcaraxë in general did interest her, though, and she thought she might have asked Ranya more about it, but just as she had found herself enough to open her mouth and try to touch on some aspect of the Exiles’ journeys across the Helcaraxë that would not have touched Ranya too closely (if there was, indeed, any aspect that would not have cut Ranya like a freshly-honed knife cut flesh), when Meldir broke in on the conversation.

“My dear…” His voice was so terribly gentle, so gentle that you would not have thought it had even the strength to drift over to their ears, but it sat there, clearly audible, nonetheless. “You should not dwell on such things. Not any longer. It was long ago, and far beyond your power to change.”

Ranya sucked in a harsh, shuddering breath, and it was as if whatever spell had sunk down upon her had suddenly broken. She nodded choppily, her hair spilling about her shoulders. “You… Yes, you’re right." Voice wobbling as if it was on the verge of just failing entirely, she smiled weakly at Elerâmâ. “Forgive me, little one, but I think I will be unable to tell you any more about it today. It… It may be a little while before I am able to speak of the Helcaraxë again. As Meldir says, it was long ago. But memories of events so long since passed, some of them do not fade with age. They only grow stronger, and more jagged. You will…” She squeezed her eyes shut, face contorting with what could only be pain. “I believe you will experience much the same, years and decades and centuries from now. We have both lived through things that will not dull with age.”

Elerâmâ… agreed. She agreed, and it was for that reason that she nodded, and did not press any further. She could already feel the edges of memories sharp enough to cut. If she pressed any of those edges into Ranya’s flesh, she knew she would be able to feel them cutting hers, as well.

Another time, then. Another time. It wasn’t as if Elerâmâ didn’t already have enough to think about.

-0-0-0-

It would be late that night, when Elerâmâ would wake from a deep sleep to the snuffling sound of muffled sobbing. She did not get up from where she slept on the warm ground, but she did open her eyes and lift her head a little, eyes still weighted down with sleep scanning the clearing on the side of the road where they had made camp.

Through her blurry, only slowly-clearing vision, she saw Ranya and Meldir sitting up. Ranya was curled in on herself and visibly shaking, such a violent tremor in her shoulders that with a strong wind, she would perhaps come apart at the seams, flying into a thousand little pieces. Meldir had wrapped his arms around her and towed her head to his chest, his hand cradling the back of her head.

Elerâmâ watched them sitting like this, something hot and squirming wriggling around in her stomach, her own throat tightening at the sight of Ranya’s hands fisted in Meldir’s shirt sleeves.

She tried to imagine someone, anyone, ever holding her like that. Her parents might have done it, but her parents were dead. Elerâmâ tried to imagine gathering to her anyone else who loved her enough to hold her like that, strained the imagination to make a simulacrum of the pressure of flesh on flesh and the gentle touch of cradling hands, to summon the sensation of the rise and fall of the chest of whoever might hold her in their comforting embrace.

But here, her imagination failed her. She could not imagine it. All she could imagine was an image of herself, sinking into the mystery she would make of herself, and never emerging again. Perhaps one day, there would be someone in Lórinand who knew her true name. But tonight, she just could not imagine it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Arafinwë** —Finarfin
> 
> **Anār** —a Primitive Quendian name for the Sun, derived from the root ‘anár-.’  
>  **Araman** —possibly meaning ‘Beside Aman’ or ‘Outside Aman’ (Quenya); a barren land in the north of Aman, on the coast between the Pelóri mountain range and the Sundering Sea. It reaches northwards up to the Helcaraxë.  
>  **Balī** —the Valar (singular: Bálā) (Primitive Quendian); derived from the root ‘BAL-‘, meaning ‘power’  
>  **Endóre** —Middle-Earth (Quenya)  
>  **Helcaraxë** —the Grinding Ice (Quenya); the bridge of ice between Araman and Middle-Earth in the far north of the world. Morgoth and Ungoliant escaped to Middle-Earth by this road after destroying the Two Trees. Later, after the burning of the ships at Losgar, the Ñoldorin exiles abandoned on the other side of the sea traveled to Middle-Earth by this road at great risk to themselves.  
>  **Kwendî** —the Primitive Quendian name for the Elves, later adapted as the Quenya ‘Quendi’ (singular: Kwende)  
>  **Lórinand** —‘Valley of Gold’ (Nandorin); one of the many other names of Lothlórien  
>  **Ranā** —a Primitive Quendian name for the Moon, derived from the root ‘ran-‘ meaning ‘wander, stray.


	8. Chapter Eight

There was little opportunity for story-telling over the next few days, for Ranya was quiet and strange in the wagon, the light in her eyes almost dimmed, though Elerâmâ would soon convince herself that that had just been a trick of the light. She could not imagine anything that could ever dim such a light. There was no denying, though, that Ranya herself seemed subdued. She said very little beyond what was absolutely necessary, and barely touched her graphite stick or parchment-paper beyond a few idle scribbles that were soon abandoned. On one occasion, Elerâmâ saw Ranya trying to work herself up to, she was almost certain, ball up the piece of parchment-paper she was currently working on, and then perhaps snap the graphite stick in two and hurl it against the back wall of the wagon—the way she was holding each end of the graphite stick in her hands certainly suggested some sort of violent intent.

But after a long moment passed, a long moment in which Elerâmâ watched her with a combination of trepidation and anticipation, Ranya set her drawing materials down, and turned to staring out of the window, hand curled up against her mouth, eyes glazed over and most likely unseeing. On that day, she did not pick up her drawing materials for the rest of the day, and every time they stopped for a few minutes to walk around, or to give the horses some rest, Meldir would throw his arm around her shoulders while the two of them walked together. That gesture was made a little awkward by the fact that Ranya was an inch or two taller than Meldir, at least in Elerâmâ’s eyes, but neither of them seemed to really notice or care about any potential awkwardness, so contemplation of it soon drifted out of Elerâmâ’s mind.

Ranya was plainly in no mood to play the part of an entertainer, and perhaps under other circumstances, that would have left Elerâmâ at loose ends and thus desperately bored, but at this juncture, it was not so. Elerâmâ had plenty of things with which to occupy her mind.

She still had little inclination to hear either Ranya or, at this point, more likely Meldir wax lyrical about the glories of Lórinand. Elerâmâ was still quite firm on this point: no matter what it was like, it would never be the equal of her own original home, for it would never have her parents in it, and had she spent the entire journey being fed on tales of Lórinand’s wonders, she would only have been all the more disappointed for it, once they reached Lórinand and it inevitably failed to live up to the expectations that had been laid down for her. Elerâmâ could live without knowing what Lórinand was like until she saw it for herself, and then drawing her own conclusions from there. She thought that might be the best way to go about things.

(She had remembered something about what her mother had told her of Lindórinand: it was a valley full of the Nandor, who sang so sweetly and so constantly that they had given the valley that name. According to Mother, they had ever sang so because they had fled to Lindórinand from the unhappy lands in the far west, where the Dark Hunter and the Exiles waged war against each other. They sang so because they had spent years and decades in fearful silence, afraid of what their songs would draw to them out of the dark of the night, and once they had found a land where they could be safe, they simply sang and sang and sang until they sang themselves hoarse, so happy were they to finally have found a place where they could sing all they liked.

It… sounded interesting. Somehow, Elerâmâ thought that Lórinand would probably turn out to be an at least somewhat different place.)

Elerâmâ did not want to know any more about Lórinand, not until the knowledge was thrust upon her by close proximity. She would never know just where her mother had been taking her and her father, but she could guess that it had not been Lórinand. She had no reason for that supposition, except that when she thought about it, it just did not _feel_ right. She wasn’t certain why, but she did not think that her mother would have ever been taking her to a haven of Sindar and a home for Exiles. She didn’t think that that was a place where her mother would have ever desired to spend more than a few days, resting, before resuming a journey that would no doubt carry them far away from that place. They were not the sort of people who dwelled among those who regarded the Balī in any light other than the wan, sickly light of suspicion and doubt and that faint thrill of fear that struck you before terror could reach you.

Well, Elerâmâ _hadn’t_ been that kind of person. Circumstances had conspired to ensure that she would become one, whether she wanted to or not.

But now, she was being driven in a wagon ever closer to Lórinand, and once there, she would have to make a life there, at least until she was grown and those who had the power of coming and going over the Kwendî who lived in Lórinand deemed her capable of caring for herself, and thus capable of leaving. Elerâmâ would have to find a way to live among Kwendî like the Kwendî she would find in Lórinand, and yet remain enough herself that she never looked upon the would-be destroyers of this world with anything resembling affection or respect.

She couldn’t go home again. Oh, Elerâmâ supposed that, technically, once she was grown, she could try to find her way back to the house where she had been born. That would have been within her power. But it would not have been the same. She would either find the house dilapidated or inhabited by a family who had (rightly, if we are being very honest) assumed that the original occupants just were not coming back. And even if, by some happy chance, Elerâmâ had come home to find the house both empty and in good enough shape to live in, her parents would still be dead. The house would still fail to be home, for they would not be there. It would not be the same.

Elerâmâ could not go home again. The way behind her was irrevocably shut. All she could do was keep moving forwards. No matter where that path might lead her.

Elerâmâ must keep moving forwards, no matter where her path might lead her. And to keep herself as she was, she must weave a cocoon around herself. She must weave a case of mystery secure enough that only those who would never have used the information to hurt her would be motivated enough to cut through and discover the truth lying underneath.

She needed a new name. It would not be her true name, never her true name; what it would be was the mask that sheltered her true self behind it. She needed a name that could become part of the mystery, rather than something that stuck out from it, something that did not belong with it.

It was not the work of an hour, obviously, trying to think of a name that would suit. Not the work of an hour, not the work of six hours, not the work of a day, and not the work of a week. It was elusive and slippery—whenever Elerâmâ thought she had it within her grasp, it slipped out of her hands, darting out of reach once more.

Truly, she had been trying to pin something down, ever since it had been dictated to her that this was something she would need to do, in order to get along in Lórinand. Meldir’s suggestion it had been, but more than that, it was Ranya’s agreement in the face of her obvious discomfort that made Elerâmâ think that this would be necessary. Elerâmâ had been trying to pin down a new name for herself, a mask of a name that would have sheltered her from any potential harm.

If there was anything Ranya’s strange behavior was good for, it was good for Elerâmâ’s groping around in her mind for a name that could now be hers. Elerâmâ sorted through every name she could think of, every element she could stitch to every other element to make a name that would not have been too obviously a pseudonym. She did that, and did it again, and again, but nothing she came up with really seemed to fit.

Part of it, Elerâmâ would admit, was her own attachment to the name her parents had given her. She yet found the idea of discarding it, even temporarily, for another one to be repulsive. All she had of her parents now, all she really had, was what they had taught her, and the name they had given her. She was determined to cling to the telling of stories, and Elerâmâ could as of yet envision no life for herself where the things her father had taught her about preparing the bodies of game animals he had killed would not come in handy. (Elerâmâ had never _seen_ a city, let alone lived in one. Her mother’s stories had touched upon them, but nothing her mother had ever told her was capable of preparing her for the reality of living in such a place. She’d never imagined what it could be like to live in a place where she would not have to prepare any of her own food. When that moment came, she found she did not hate it as much as she ought to have.)

Were Elerâmâ to give up the name, she was afraid she would lose herself along with it. The prospect of losing herself had once, perhaps, been attractive, if only because if she lost herself, she would lose her pain along with it. But the prospect no longer held any appeal for her. She did not want to lose herself. If she lost herself, she would lose all memories of her parents right along with herself, and were she to recover the former, the latter might be lost beyond all recall. Elerâmâ did not relish that, no. Even if the memories were to turn to knives and cut her flesh to ribbons, she would hold on to them as tightly as her grip allowed.

So, obviously, Elerâmâ had to be careful when picking out a new name for herself. She had to be careful that it was something that serviced the mystery rather than detracting from it. She had to be careful that she never, _ever_ made the mistake of thinking of it as her name, never made the mistake of letting it become her true name and letting everything that had ever been attached to ‘Elerâmâ’ fall to the wayside alongside that name.

She had to be careful. She could not be careless when selecting the name that would become her mask. It could not be something that sounded too much like her true name, but at the same time, it could not be something that would have been burdensome to bear. She could not pick a name for herself that she really thought would ever become hateful to her heart.

But that was just the thing, wasn’t it? Elerâmâ had yet to _know_ what it was really like, bearing a name that was not her own. She could not say or guess how heavy a burden it would become for her. Even the most pleasing-sounding name in the world could eventually have become hateful to her, for the very simple reason that it was not ‘Elerâmâ,’ not the name her parents had given her, not the name by which they had called her. Even the most pleasing-sounding name in the world could have eventually become hideous to Elerâmâ’s ears, as unwelcome on her skin as any shackle could have been.

Elerâmâ did not know how likely that was to occur. There was someone who might know, someone who was sitting right across from her in this wagon. _Ranya_ might well have known what it was like to have to go by a different name, for stray comments she had made hinted to Elerâmâ that, for a long time, that was exactly what she had been made to do. But Ranya was plainly in no mood to speak of such things, right now. Ranya had been staring blankly out of the window for hours now, without saying a single word to Elerâmâ for that whole time. She would not speak of grinding Ice, would not speak of whatever cloud of dark in her mind hid the means by which the Exiles had arrived at the borders of the Helcaraxë in the first place. She would not speak of names. Elerâmâ had not asked, but she knew. She just knew. Ranya would not speak of names.

And really, this should not be the sort of thing Elerâmâ should be seeking out advice on. The mystery would be more original, more difficult to crack, if she did not consciously borrow details from anyone who was yet living. If Ranya had once gone by a different name, Elerâmâ should not choose her mask-name the same way Ranya had chosen hers, not intentionally.

So. Elerâmâ flopped down on her back on the thin cushions and hard wood of the bench, staring up at the ceiling. She began to cycle through names once more, pushing elements together for something that might fit together and then also fit on her tongue. She searched through her mind for ways she could hide herself, and then hints she could lay down, things that the layman would never have been able to correctly identify, but that a dedicated quester might have recognized as a piece of her heart, lying naked on the ground, waiting to be reunited with the whole.

The name was… It was almost there. Not quite. She just needed some more time.

-0-0-0-

It was one hot, still afternoon, as Elerâmâ was sitting on the edge of the back door out of the wagon, that the thought really hit her: this was the furthest she had ever been from home.

Why it was hitting her now, she had no idea. It would not be the first time that it had hit her, for the thought had come to her over and over while she was yet traveling with her parents, and by the time they had… By the time she had gone into Ranya and Meldir’s wagon, the thought was something like an old friend. Certainly, she no longer marked its comings and goings; to her mind, there had been absolutely no point. It was just a thought that returned to her periodically; it was nothing special.

But it was back again, now, and it was hitting her like a wagon might have hit her, if she was standing in the middle of the road and the horses were dragging the wagon on behind them as fast as they could go.

This was the furthest she had ever been from home. The thought most likely would not have come to her, and even had it come to her, it would have had no weight, except for the fact that Elerâmâ had never fathomed that a day could come that she would find herself this far from home, without her parents beside her.

She wanted to drown the thought. Not herself, mind you; just the thought. From the back of the wagon, Elerâmâ could hear the rushing of flowing water. She stepped away from the road, and quickly found Meldir and Ranya, sitting under a beech tree in silence, but she did not join them. Further down the bank, she saw what she had hoped she saw: a creek, fast-flowing and dotted through with boulders, but not looking more than maybe six or seven feet deep.

“Where are you going?” Meldir called to her, but Elerâmâ just kept on walking without answering him. Honestly, she barely even _heard_ him; the whole of her attention was focused on the water.

It struck Elerâmâ as she was removing her shoes that she could not hear any of the voices she had ever heard murmuring within the water. Strange, garbled voices they had ever been, saying things that she had never been able to decipher and in some cases had barely been able to _hear_ , but they had always been _present_ when Elerâmâ strained her ears to listen. Now, as she was shucking also the outer layers of her clothing, she could not hear the susurrus at all.

Oh, she would hear it once she was below the surface of the water. Once she was swimming in the creek, she would have so many things. She would have the cool that this sticky afternoon was intent on denying her, she would have the embrace of water, and when she was below the surface of the water, Elerâmâ had no doubt that she would have also the murmuring of the voices of the spirits of those dead Kwendî.

As she waded in to the water, she wondered if she would hear her parents.

Elerâmâ dove under the surface, swimming in the shockingly, _gloriously_ cold water, kicking her feet as she dove further and further down. Water rushed in her ears, insistent and never-ending. She stayed below the surface, lungs screaming with an increasing insistency of their own, straining her ears for something, anything else that might be heard there. _There must be something, must be anything at all…_

Eventually, Elerâmâ could ignore the screaming in her lungs no longer, and she resurfaced, gasping and spluttering, water dripping from her lips. She hauled herself up onto a mossy boulder, pushing the wet, leaden, dripping mass that was her hair from her face. She let her legs sit under the surface, being pushed gently to one side by the inexorable current of the water, too breathless to pull her body all the way up out of the water.

“If you had wanted a bath that badly, you might have said something.”

But Elerâmâ barely heard the words, and later, would not remember which of the adults who had been carrying her every further and further south had said it to her.

She was sorting through her memories, frantically, the way you would sort through a pile of receipts trying to find the one missing from your ledger when you weren’t entirely certain that this receipt even existed, and you were _starting_ to suspect that someone had been dipping their hands in the pot while you weren’t looking. Or something like that. Maybe, when Elerâmâ was older, and she’d had more experience telling stories to strangers, she would be a little better with her metaphors. Or maybe they would always be like this, something that didn’t fit in with the rest of the story and just sat, bulbous and mismatched, like a glob of mud in the middle of a treasury.

Anyways.

Elerâmâ had been listening for it the whole time, you know. For the whispering of voices whose words she was never quite able to decipher. Perhaps she’d been listening for some familiar tone or inflection that would have identified her parents, as well. She had strained her ears for it as she had strained her ears for nothing else in her whole life. If she could have had the faintest hint of it, she knew that she would still have had understood none of it—Elerâmâ not having been magically endowed with the ability to understand the language of the voices of spirits, if it was even a language at all.

She would not have understood a word of it, but if she could have had even a faint whisper, even a hint of something that she could have connected to her parents’ voices, she thought she would have been able to convince herself that it had been their blessing. Oh, Elerâmâ still wouldn’t have understood a word of what was being said, but she would have assumed it was their blessing, anyways. She thought she could have tricked her mind into believing that. Within a few days, she thought she could have tricked her mind into believing that she really _had_ heard a clearly audible, clearly intelligible blessing.

She had heard no such thing. Elerâmâ had not heard anything she could have taken for the voices of her parents. She had not heard even the whispers of the voices of dead Kwendî within the waters, as she had heard in every body of water she had ever encountered up until now; even a puddle, if it gained enough water to start to run, would start to whisper with those voices. When Elerâmâ had plunged down into the waters of this creek, she had heard only water.

It seemed that she strayed so far from home that even the waters were so different that the spirits of their dead would not reside within them.

By their silence, Elerâmâ thought she had her answer:

She was on her own.

Maybe she could make that into some sort of blessing. Perhaps, she could manage that.

-0-0-0-

“I never did tell you why I was so insistent that we not cut any of the tangles out of your hair, did I?”

At Meldir’s half-worried, half-amused bidding, Elerâmâ had swam back to shore so that she could dry off properly under the sun before putting her outer layers of clothing back on over her currently-sodden smallclothes. _Well, I see I will have no occasion to teach you to swim,_ he had remarked, and his laughter had sounded only a little strained. _I think you may swim better than I do. Perhaps we should start calling you ‘little fish.’_

_We are not calling her ‘little fish,’_ Ranya had retorted without any heat, even as she was pulling her hair comb out of seemingly nowhere. _Not unless she performs a great deal more feats of swimming mastery, and actually grows scales, for good measure._

Elerâmâ, as it happens, had no intention of growing scales. So, no, there would be no calling her ‘little fish’ any time soon.

What Elerâmâ was actually doing at the moment was sitting still so that Ranya could comb out her still soaking wet hair before it dried and the tangles that had no doubt formed in her hair while it being batted to and fro by the creek could dry and tighten and become the sort of snarls that would only come out with a great deal of pain and profanity. On both their parts, really. She would have taken the comb out of Ranya’s hand, but Ranya hadn’t really given her the chance, and admittedly, Elerâmâ had a hard time really seeing properly to the hair at the very back of her head. If Ranya could ensure that she wouldn’t wind up with any especially bad tangles there, Elerâmâ really shouldn’t be shunning the help.

And there was the matter of Elerâmâ not really having the energy to try and start a fight over the comb. Not after what she had failed to hear in the water.

_Perhaps the silence is a message. Perhaps it is a message to me that I should not linger, and listen for ghosts._

Elerâmâ had thought that she might be able to weave the silence into the story of a blessing. She’d not thought that the weaving would start quite so soon. Oh, well. The sooner that story was weaved, the sooner the silence would stop feeling like a slap in the face.

Elerâmâ could not shake her head. If she shook her head, Ranya would tell her to hold still and not risk spoiling her work. Instead, she ventured cautiously, “No…”

“Hmm. It is not a particularly cheerful story.” Though Ranya was sitting behind Elerâmâ, and there was no reflective surface before her that could show Elerâmâ Ranya’s face, she could practically _hear_ the grim smile in her voice. “But I believe you wanted me to tell you more of the Helcaraxë, didn’t you?”

Elerâmâ caught herself trying to nod, before she deliberately stopped herself. She sucked in a deep breath, and was kind of proud of herself for managing to keep herself from sounding obscenely over-eager as she affirmed, “I did.”

“Of course you did.” Ranya dug her fingers into Elerâmâ’s hair, trying to disentangle a particularly stubborn snarl of hair without having to bring the rather less merciful comb into it. “You have been unbelievably bored this whole time, haven’t you? A gruesome little story—well, I suppose it is not gruesome so much as it is just a bit _trying_ —would be a better way to pass the time than trying and failing to take a nap. I warn you, though, I am no great shakes at storytelling, so you may have to fill in some of the blanks yourself.”

Elerâmâ thought that Ranya was perhaps selling herself a bit short. Though she was obviously not a trained storyteller—she clearly didn’t understand how telling stories was supposed to _work_ —when she’d told those little bits and pieces of stories to Elerâmâ, she’d done a decent job at weaving together a vivid image of what was going on. She had given Elerâmâ things that she could work with.

But she was not going to tell Ranya this. Something she had learned in the village she had often visited with her parents was that adults rarely cared to be consoled by children; she’d gotten a telling off by a weaver who had considered her attempts at consolation after an accident in her workshop some sort of childish mouthing-off. Besides that, she preferred right now to keep to herself that she, herself, had any real knowledge of how storytelling worked. Let Elerâmâ’s knowledge be an early part of the mystery. Let no one know just from where she had obtained her original font of knowledge, as she worked to gain more. Give them something to think about.

“Honestly, I don’t know that this is even really worth telling a story about, at all,” Ranya remarked with a sigh, “but I suppose it should give you some context—and impress upon you the importance of keeping your hair clean as best you can, even when you are not in a situation where that is particularly easy, or safe.

“I told you some of the privations we suffered on the ice fields and the jagged ice mountains of the Helcaraxë. To recount them all would take days, and I…” She paused. Elerâmâ could feel her hands shaking, where they were delved deep in wet and tangled hair. “…I do not care to tell all of it,” Ranya said at last, just a touch unsteadily. “You and Meldir might have to pick me up off of the floor; I certainly would not be good for anything for days afterwards. I do not care for not being good for anything for days at a time, so let us keep this tale to what I can bear, shall we?

“We suffered much for food, but our hunters were able to bring down some of the great animals that had thought _us_ food for _their_ bellies. I will never forget when Princess Aredhel brought back the carcass of a bear the size of a ship. Well, I say she brought it back; what actually happened was she killed the creature, and then had to send back to the encampment for reasonably healthy Eldar to come and help her get it on some sort of sledge—or maybe it was a sheet—and drag it back to camp. The meat fed us for a while. What also profited us was the bear’s pelt; we made dozens of pieces of clothing, cloaks and capes and scarves and mittens, out of the thick hide. The bear fed us for a while, and its great pelt helped keep us warm, though there was little warmth to be found on such a desolate, forsaken place as the Helcaraxë. But this did not come without its price.

“Honestly, I would never have expected fleas or lice—I never enquired too closely as to which one it was—to be able to persist in such climates. I know little of them, but I would have thought that the sheer cold would kill them stone dead. These fleas or lice or whatever they really were must have been a breed apart, just like that bear. They were a breed apart, and they took root in our hair and feasted on our blood as if they’d had nothing to eat in decades.

“By the time we reached Endóre, there was not a single member of any of the parties of the Ñoldor who had not had their hair utterly infested with the awful little creatures. It was a _nightmare_ to deal with.” Ranya laughed bitterly, getting up and coming to sit down on Elerâmâ’s left-hand side, so that she could have a better angle to deal with the hair that had yet to be sorted out. “Absolutely unbearable; unless you’ve had to deal with an infestation yourself, I would be surprised if you have ever had to contend with such itching. In some of the more unfortunate Eldar, the bite wounds left behind became infected, which was a nightmare in and of itself.

“When we reached Endóre, we also had the good fortune of reaching lands that were warm enough that we did not need our hair for warmth so urgently as all that. We…” Ranya sighed harshly. “We had a decision to come to. Or, rather, our king had a decision to come to on our behalves.

“King Fingolfin decreed that each and every one of the Ñoldor who had survived the crossing of the Helcaraxë would have to shave their heads, in order to put the infestation to a stop. And oh, believe me, that did _not_ go over well.”

“Why not?” Elerâmâ piped up, frowning. She stared down at the creek, willing it one last time to come alive with whispering voices. But nothing doing, its voice was only a voice of water, and, albeit reluctantly, Elerâmâ turned her attention away from it. She must, if she did not wish to leave her heart here with the water.

Ranya clicked her tongue, letting her hands fall away from Elerâmâ’s hair. “I suppose you would not know,” drew reluctantly out of her mouth, as readily as if she was pulling teeth out with her bare hands. “When we came here, I learned that it is not a tradition among the Eldar of Endóre as it is in Valinor. Well, you see, Eleráma, in the early days of our joy in Valinor, there was little unrest, and virtually no crime. As the noontide soured, these things became greater problems, and there rose from that a custom.

“In those days, the Eldar all wore their hair long. From the moment our hair began to grow long, we never cut it above the shoulder, for any reason. Even blacksmiths would sooner tie their hair back than cut it short, for one very pressing reason. In Valinor, in all the great towns and cities of the Ñoldor, the Minyar, and the Falmari, it became the custom that, as punishment for certain offenses, someone would have their hair sheared to the scalp. Not completely shaven, you know; that was considered just a touch _too_ humiliating, and there were those Falmari who completely shaved their heads as a fashion statement, and no one wanted them to be confused for these troublemakers. It was considered a sign of shame for anyone to have their hair cut against their will, and though among the Falmari, a head completely shaven wasn’t necessarily considered a sign of shame, among the Ñoldor, _that_ trend never really caught on, and thus, a head sheared of hair to the scalp and a head completely shaven were often conflated together.

“There was a great deal of fuss. He made a fair point, did the king, but many of us were not willing to submit to such a measure, after everything. After everything we had gone through on the Helcaraxë, everything we had _lost_ , this just felt like adding insult to injury to many of our people, and they did _not_ hesitate to tell the king such. In no uncertain terms.

“A king is only a king if he can both protect his people, and wield the authority to make them submit to his will, and for a moment, it looked as if Fingolfin would not be a king for much longer, at least not in anything but name. But then, the Princesses Aredhel and Galadriel broke away from the rest of the crowd, and came to stand before the king—Aredhel’s father, and Galadriel’s uncle. In Princess Aredhel’s hand, she held a straight razor, like the ones those more adventurous Falmari used to shave their heads. Princess Aredhel looked to the crowd, and told them that, as distasteful as she found the idea of shaving her own hair off of her head, she believed that her father spoke wisdom, and that this was the only way to bring an end to the infestation. But the Ñoldor should not believe that the lowly among them would be made to bear what had in Valinor been considered a mark of shame, while the great and the good would go about unshaven. They would _all_ shave their heads, and she and her cousin would go first.

“These two ladies were the only ones among our people who had the honor of calling themselves the granddaughters of Finwë, our first king. They were alike in their great height and the greater strength of their bodies, but otherwise, they bore little resemblance to one another. Their hair, in particular, could not have been more different than if it had been by design.

“Princess Aredhel’s hair was… Well, it was not at all unlike yours, Eleráma, black and curly and very thick, except that I think her hair may have been just a shade darker than yours. It held a blue tint, rather than a brown one. I cannot claim to have ever known Princess Aredhel very well, but much like everyone else, I saw a great deal of her on the Helcaraxë; being in charge of so many hunting parties, she was also in charge of distributing much of the meat gained from those hunting trips. Her hair was an absolute fright to behold virtually the entire time we were on the Helcaraxë. She had braided it very tightly before we took our first steps onto the ice, and then she never bothered to unbraid it and brush it the whole time, or at least so it appeared from the way her hair looked by the time we reached Endóre. Granted, she had many more important things to do than attending to her hair, but it was always a little shocking to see a lady who was the daughter and the granddaughter of kings appearing such. Lady Galadriel, on the other hand…

“Poets and bards and writers the world over wax lyrical on women out of history whom they deem the fairest ever to have lived.” Ranya rolled her eyes, staring up at the heavens for a long moment before bringing her gaze back down to earth. “If you have ever been spared having to listen to a paean regarding the unrivaled beauty of Lúthien Tinúviel, Morwen Eledhwen, Finduilas Faelivrin, Tar-Míriel of the Númenóreans, or Varda Elentári, consider yourself lucky. Sans Lady Varda, I have met none of them, and could not say a word one way or another as to how beautiful they were or weren’t. Lady Galadriel’s beauty is sometimes praised in these…” She made a gagging sound in the back of her throat “…well, owing to your age, I cannot tell you _exactly_ what I think of them, but I can tell you that I think these descriptions get rather ridiculous after a while. She lives in Lórinand, actually, Lady Galadriel. Once you’ve seen her for yourself, you can decide whether you think the poets and bards and writers praising her as ‘fairest in the land’ actually know what they’re talking about. What every one of those poets and bards and writers agree about is that the crowning glory of Lady Galadriel’s beauty is her hair.

“Truthfully, her hair is quite interesting to look at. Her father, Arafinwë, has the gold hair of the Minyar—“ Ranya touched a lock of her own quite fantastically gold hair “—and her mother, Eärwen, is a princess of the Falmari, and bears the starlight-silver hair found among many members of the Falmari, especially those who are kin to those three brothers who led their people west out of Cuiviénen.”

At the mention of Cuiviénen, Elerâmâ stiffened. She did not like to think of what an Exile thought of her people’s homeland, or their decision not to leave it; she knew that that had been the cause of much discord, and had no desire to have to defend the decision to stay to someone who had left (or whose ancestors had left), and then left her second home as well. But mercifully, Ranya said no more about Cuiviénen. It seemed no more than a passing consideration to her, which did not sit entirely with Elerâmâ either, but there was some safety in secrecy and being overlooked, and anyways, Ranya was still talking:

“Lady Galadriel’s hair is gold and silver all at the same time, and though I have never known her very well, either, it became evident to me on the Helcaraxë just how proud she is of her hair. I saw quite a bit of Lady Galadriel during that forsaken journey as well, you know? She had many responsibilities that saw her going out and about in the cold and the snow and the wind—oh, that wretched wind—almost constantly, and though she never shirked her duties, her hair was always _immaculate_. It is a testament to how pervasive the infestation was that her hair became infested at all, because I think Lady Galadriel may have had the cleanest hair of any of us trapped on the barren ice and rocks.

“Of all the people I would have expected to volunteer to go first, or close to first, Lady Galadriel would never have come to mind. Indeed, I was close enough to the front to see that there was just a bit of trepidation on her face, before she put that all away and showed herself resolute instead.

“Princess Aredhel went first, sitting on her knees on the ground to give her cousin a better angle. I suspect, though I have never heard it confirmed anywhere, that she may have chosen to go first so that her cousin would not have to. They would have known each other much better than I ever knew either of them, and Princess Aredhel was no doubt in a much better position than I was to know just how fond her cousin was of her hair. But soon enough, both of their heads were complete shaven, and they were wrapping their scarves around their heads because, really, it was still pretty chilly, and once our hair was gone, we would all want something else with which to cover our heads. And that was that. If two _princesses_ were willing to subject themselves to what would have been such a profound humiliation back in Valinor, how could the rest of us do any less. Certainly, there were more than a few gallant men who thought the idea of two ladies such as them going about heads shaven while they still had their hair to be nothing short of an abomination. And of course, the ladies’ brothers were soon lining up so that their sisters would not be alone with their shaven heads. I think some of them may have been embarrassed that they hadn’t had the idea to go up there and do it first themselves.

“I…” Ranya paused once more. “I… remember when it was my turn. I… I very much did not want to do it. When I lived in Tirion, I trimmed my hair, of course, for I did not want it to get so long as to become unmanageable. But I thought my hair was quite nice and I did not want to part from it, not even temporarily, not even when it was full of those awful, unbearable little beasts.

“But there was no choice. It was shave my head, or deal with the itching for the foreseeable future, and possibly find myself dealing with sores as well. I shaved my head, and did not dare look at my shorn hair afterwards, for I was sure that I would break into a flood of tears and never smile again. I’m just grateful that my little sister was not there to undergo such a hard thing as that; I think it might have actually killed her.”

At that, Elerâmâ blinked, jolted from drifting in the story that Ranya was telling her, and craned her head around to stare directly up into Ranya’s face. For once not feeling even remotely shy of the keen brightness of her glance, she asked, “You have a sister? Where is she?”

It seemed a natural question. Elerâmâ had no siblings (would never have any, now), and for a while, she had very much fancied the idea of having some. But after a while, she’d decided that she did not fancy the idea so much as all that, for she liked having her own room and no competition for her parents’ attention. There had not been an overabundance of children in the village, and she had little idea of what it was like to have siblings. Perhaps this, too…

Ranya was shaking her head, her bright eyes suddenly _very_ bright indeed. “She is in Aman,” she muttered, and would say nothing more as she combed out Elerâmâ’s rapidly drying hair.

But after everything else she had told her, Elerâmâ thought she understood.

-0-0-0-

For all that Ranya disavowed any great skill as a storyteller, the image she had presented to Elerâmâ stuck with her through the rest of their journey. She thought of a great host of Kwendî, cast out of their home and only coming to their new one—their original one, the one they should have had forever—after many trials, standing in the lands the Balī had forsaken and shearing off all of their hair. She thought of it quite a lot, even when there was no impetus, nothing in her own life that would organically hearken to it.

What she was thinking of was a great cloud of hair, tufts of black and gold and brown and silver and red floating away in a breeze. Perhaps the wind ever blew away from the Uttermost West in those days—Elerâmâ would not put it past the Balī to do such a thing, so that they would never again have to deal with anything of the Exiles’, and go back to their lives of barely being aware of anything that did not concern them directly. But something in her just imagined the wind blowing west, the wind carrying that hair across the Sea, that hair blanketing the shores of the Uttermost West with their myriad shades, a clarion signal to the Balī and all the Kwendî who yet dwelled there: the Exiles had survived, and they would not be so easily broken by what trials the Balī had forced them to undergo just to leave their strange lands.

She thought about it, about knowing of survival, of being the ones who survived, the ones who had been brave enough to leave. She knew she did not have the whole story from Ranya yet, but she could guess just how daunting it would be to leave such a land, when such creatures as the Balī made it clear that they did not want you to leave.

A signal of continued life. A sign of continued defiance against those who had wished to pen them in.

And… And she thought the story had helped her, on another score, as well.

“I want to be called Ídhril,” Elerâmâ told the pair of them, as they were making their way ever further down the road, further from anything and everything Elerâmâ had ever known, further from home. She had thought the name would be hard and cumbersome on her tongue, but it flowed smoothly, as though it had always been there. She did not know whether she should be reassured by that or not.

But she knew one thing very well. It would help her. It would help hide her from those who would wish her harm, and it would help her remember what she had been, before she had been an orphan carried away to a strange land. It would ground her, and ensure that, if the day came when someone cut through the sticky web of mystery to reach her at the core, she would still be there to greet them. She would like that. After all, who did not want to be known?

“Ídhril, eh?” Meldir called cheerfully into the wagon. “It’s a good name. A strong name.”

“And it is just as well that you have chosen,” Ranya murmured, “for we have nearly arrived.”

Elerâmâ’s heart jolted in her chest as Meldir pulled the wagon to a halt, and let her out so that she could look.

They were stopped at the crest of a great hill, and down below, some two or maybe three miles away, was a vast, wooded valley. There were trees there that towered so far above the others that they made those trees look like bushes. Elerâmâ thought she could hear singing, though that was yet far distant, and barely discernible at all. And…

Do you know, she had thought it a trick of the light, or that she was so tired that her eyes were playing tricks? But no, she saw true: from the vast forest there came a faint glow of golden light, like sunlight, except the sun was falling fast over the mountains, and the first stars were twinkling against a darkening sky.

“Lórinand is as close to Aman as any land you will find east of the Sea,” Ranya told her. There was a strange strain in her voice as she said it, equal parts ambivalence and longing. She put a hand on Elerâmâ’s shoulder and squeezed gently. “It is as fair as any land you will ever see, unless you take to the ships and travel west. And it is safe. No harm will befall you there, I swear it.”

Elerâmâ nodded absently. Ranya was speaking of physical harm, no doubt, and in a place that so strongly radiated power that that power had taken on a color all its own, clearly there were forces at work that could keep the valley’s residents from any physical harm.

But Elerâmâ had heard enough stories to know that there was more than one way that harm could find you, and when she looked at it from that angle, she did not think that Lórinand would be a particularly safe place at all. Even from this distance, it seemed like the sort of place where it would have been very easy for her to lose herself entirely, just drift away and have someone else walk off with her body.

Well. It was a good thing that Elerâmâ was planning to put herself away somewhere only those who loved her and would not wish her to become lost would be able to find her. It would be easier for her to keep an eye on herself, that way. Elerâmâ had a feeling she was going to need to keep an eye on herself quite a lot.

She thought she was up to the task. If Tatiē could travel over mountains and weave a body for a pillar of fire and bring enchanted fruit back for the pleasure and comfort of an irritated serpent, she thought she could keep from losing track of herself. Maybe one day, she would be telling stories of herself, and her adventures in this hair-raising land.

She just hoped that when she told them, she would be able to call herself by her name.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Arafinwë** —Finarfin
> 
> **Balī** —the Valar (singular: Bálā) (Primitive Quendian); derived from the root ‘BAL-‘, meaning ‘power’  
>  **Cuiviénen** —‘Water of Awakening’ (Quenya); the lake in Middle-Earth by which the Elves (then composed of the Minyar, Tatyar, and Nelyar) first awoke.   
> **Eldar** —‘People of the Stars’ (Quenya); a name first given to the Elves by Oromë when he found them by Cuiviénen, but later came to refer only to those who answered the summons to Aman and set out on the March, with those who chose to remain by Cuiviénen coming to be known as the Avari; the Eldar were composed of these groups: the Vanyar, Ñoldor (those among them who chose to go to Aman), and the Teleri (including their divisions: the Lindar, Falmari, Sindar and Nandor).  
>  **Endóre** —Middle-Earth (Quenya)  
>  **Falmari** —those among the Teleri who completed the journey to Aman; the name is derived from the Quenya falma, '[crested] wave.'  
>  **Helcaraxë** —the Grinding Ice (Quenya); the bridge of ice between Araman and Middle-Earth in the far north of the world. Morgoth and Ungoliant escaped to Middle-Earth by this road after destroying the Two Trees. Later, after the burning of the ships at Losgar, the Ñoldorin exiles abandoned on the other side of the sea traveled to Middle-Earth by this road at great risk to themselves.  
>  **Kwendî** —the Primitive Quendian name for the Elves, later adapted as the Quenya ‘Quendi’ (singular: Kwende)  
>  **Lindórinand** —‘Vale of the Land of Singers’ (Nandorin); one of the original names given to Lothlórien by its first, Nandorin inhabitants.  
>  **Lórinand** —‘Valley of Gold’ (Nandorin); one of the many other names of Lothlórien  
>  **Minyar** —‘Firsts’, the first clan of the Elves of Cuiviénen, who were named for Imin and Iminyë, the former of whom was the first Elf to awaken. The Ñoldor called them ‘Vanyar’, ‘Fair ones’ (rendered in Primitive Quendian as ‘wanjā’, and rendered in Telerin as ‘Vaniai’), due to the nearly-universal trait of fair hair among the clan, but even in Aman, they still often referred to themselves as ‘Minyar.’ (Singular: Minya) (Adjectival form: Minyarin)


End file.
